Facile Synthesis of Uniform Raspberry-Like Gold Nanoparticles for High Performance Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering.

Hierarchical Au nanostructures have attracted considerable attention owing to their rich hot-spots in inherent structures that have found various applications in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) based sensing and imaging. Herein we facilely synthesized uniform hierarchical raspberry-like Au nanostructures with tunable size via a seed-mediated growth approach employing a binary mixture of quaternized chitosan (QCS) and 5-bromosalicylic acid (5-BrSA). 5-BrSA plays an important role in tuning shapes and improving uniformity of resultant gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). The obtained raspberry-like Au nanostructures have a spherical profile and randomly arranged protrusions on the outsides, and their size can be finely tuned in a range from 50 to 120 nm. The rough surfaces of the special raspberry-like Au nanostructures endow them higher SERS performance than spherical Au spheres with smooth surfaces, which is promising for the application of SERS based sensors and optical imaging.