SERS detection of thiram using polyacrylamide hydrogel-enclosed gold nanoparticle aggregates

The development of sensitive and long-term signal-stable plasmonic substrates is vital to the in-field application of the surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) technique. The colloidal gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) system is commonly used in SERS detection, but it shows less signal stability and reproducibility due to the uncontrollable aggregation of nanoparticles by adding aggregating agents in SERS detection. In this study, we developed a new SERS detection platform based on polyacrylamide hydrogel-enclosed plasmonic gold nanoparticle aggregates (PAH-AuANs). In the system, the formation of PAH can rapidly stabilize the gold nanoparticle aggregates, avoiding the over-aggregation or precipitation of AuNPs. With the PAH concentration in the range of 6-10 % and AuNPs at the concentration of 0.2 nM, the resulting PAH-AuNAs platform exhibited both sensitive SERS activity and excellent SERS signal stability. The relative standard deviation of the 4-MBA probe SERS signal collected from the PAH-AuNAs platform was lower than 3 %. The limit of detection for the pesticide thiram was down to 0.38 μg/L with a handheld Raman spectrometer. Moreover, the procedure for preparing the PAH-AuNAs platform was easy to handle, offering a new strategy for in-field detection of environmental contaminants with a handheld Raman spectrometer in the future.