RESEARCH PAPER Ultraviolet pulsed laser interference lithography and application of periodic structured Ag-nanoparticle films for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy Shi Bai • Weiping Zhou • Yuanhai Lin • Yan Zhao • Tao Chen • Anming Hu • W. W. Duley Received: 23 January 2014 / Accepted: 19 May 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Ag-nanoparticle films were deposited on glass and silicon substrates by evaporation of a colloidal solution. Periodic structures were created in these Ag nanoparticle deposits by ultraviolet nano- second laser interference lithography (LIL). We find that the periodic structure and size of Ag nanoparticles in these oriented arrays can be controlled by varying laser pulse energy as well as the number of pulses used in irradiation. The effect of these parameters on the overall morphology of these deposits is shown to be promising as a new technique for the engineering of sub-micron nanoparticle structures. Ag films with laser-induced sub-micron periodic structures were evaluated as substrates for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy using rhodamine B adsorbed from a 10 -8 M solution. Enhancement factors were found to be[ 10 6 those found in conventional Raman scattering and 10 times greater than those from standard Ag- nanoparticle films. These results indicate that the LIL method has promise in the nanostructuring of Ag- nanoparticle films for ultrasensitive SERS biosensing substrates. Keywords Laser interference lithography  Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy  Ag-nanoparticle film  Enhancement factor  Periodic structure Introduction A variety of laser processing techniques, including laser direct writing (LDW) and laser interference lithography (LIL), have been shown to be cost- effective in nano-scale and micro-scale industrial manufacturing (Nakata and Miyanaga 2010; Abid et al. 2013). In addition, periodic structures in metallic films can be precisely generated using LIL. Some examples include the formation of dot arrays (Chang et al. 2009), gratings (Oliveira et al. 2013), and circular ring arrays (Kaakkunen et al. 2011). These controlla- ble patterns are fundamental to the development of nano-antennas (Li et al. 2012), in biosensing (Peng et al. 2012a, b), and in environmental monitoring (Gajaraj et al. 2013). Another important application is S. Bai  W. Zhou  Y. Zhao  T. Chen  A. Hu (&) Institute of Laser Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, 100 Pingle Yuan, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100124, People’s Republic of China e-mail: anminghu@bjut.edu.cn Y. Lin Institute of Information Photonics Technology and College of Applied Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, 100 Pingle Yuan, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100124, People’s Republic of China W. W. Duley Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada 123 J Nanopart Res (2014) 16:2470 DOI 10.1007/s11051-014-2470-7