Flexible and smart fibers decorated with Ag nanoflowers for highly active surface-enhanced Raman scattering detection

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a useful detection technique for molecule recognition. However, the relative difficulty in producing low-cost highly active SERS substrates in large quantities hinders their practical implementation. Here, a fast and facile approach using a one-step solution-phase synthesis is proposed to directly achieve highly active fibrous SERS substrates by uniformly and densely growing silver nanoflowers on reduced graphene oxide fibers within several minutes. Attributed to the abundance of nanogaps throughout the silver nanoflower network, the fibrous substrate exhibits superior stability and high sensitivity in the SERS detection of Rhodamine 6G, with a detection limit of 10(-12) M. Importantly, the proposed method is energy efficient and can work well at room temperature and manually stirring conditions based on naturally shed hair and plant fibers. Due to the advantages of high-volume production, the processing cost is greatly reduced to approximately $0.008 for each substrate. This newly designed approach may greatly improve the practical application of SERS detection in environmental monitoring, medicine and food safety, especially in resource-limited environments.