SERS sensors for biomedical tubing

AbstractThere is strong motivation for the development detection systems that can provide continuous analysis of fluids in medical tubing used to either deliver or remove fluids from a patient's body. Possible applications include systems that increase the safety of intravenous (IV) drug injection and point-of-care health monitoring during urinary catheterization. This talk will describe recent efforts in our group to develop nanostructured surfaces capable of performing Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) with high electromagnetic enhancement factors, while utilizing fabrication processes that enable SERS surfaces to be fabricated inexpensively on flexible plastic substrates over large areas. In particular, Glancing Angle Deposition (GLAD) has been used to provide densely packed arrays of dielectric-metal “post-cap” structures with 10-20 nm gaps between adjacent metal nanoparticles. We have also developed nanoreplica molding approaches for producing arrays of silver “nanodomes” with