Fabrication of Au nanotube arrays and their plasmonic properties

Large-scale Au nanotube arrays on ITO/glass with tunable inner diameters and wall thicknesses were fabricated via a CdSe nanotube array templating method. The initial tubular morphology of the CdSe-nanotube template was maintained during the synthesis, while the composition was converted from CdSe to Au. The obtained Au nanotube arrays showed two surface plasmon resonances in the extinction spectrum, mainly contributed by electron oscillation along the transverse and the longitudinal directions. When used as the substrate for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), the Raman scattering of the probe molecules (4-mercaptobenzoic acid) was amplified by approximately 4 orders of magnitude, mainly due to the plasmonic enhancement effect of the Au nanotube arrays.