Nanostructures Composed of Dual Plasmonic Materials Exhibiting High Thermal Stability and SERS Enhancement

Abstract As one kind of alternative to conventional metals, titanium nitride offers many advantages in the rapidly growing fields of plasmonics and metamaterials. However, the development of TiN x ‐based plasmonics is severally limited by the difficulty in the preparation. Herein, a facial approach is developed for the preparation of Au@TiN x core‐shell nanostructures. The synthesis starts with colloidal Au nanospheres, followed by the growth of amorphous TiO 2 shells. The obtained Au@a‐TiO 2 nanostructures convert into Au@TiN x through nitridation at high temperature in ammonia atmosphere. The prepared Au@TiN x nanostructures have strong plasmonic scatting in the visible region and strong field enhancement at the surface of nanostructures. Au@TiN x nanostructures also exhibit a relatively large enhancement for Raman scattering. The developed preparation method can produce TiN x nanostructures with relatively uniform size and thus will be very helpful to the development of TiN x ‐base plasmonics.