300 mm Wafer-level, ultra-dense arrays of Au-capped nanopillars with sub-10 nm gaps as reliable SERS substrates

The 193 nm deep UV immersion lithography is leveraged to fabricate highly dense and uniform arrays of Au-capped Si nanopillars on a 300 mm wafer level, and the substrates are applied in surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy for reliable molecule detection. Due to the sub-10 nm gap sizes and ultra-high array density with the lattice constant less than 100 nm, our nanopillar based substrates outperform the current commercial products in terms of the signal intensity, reproducibility and fabrication scale.crosscheck: This document is CrossCheck deposited related_data: Supplementary Information copyright_licence: The Royal Society of Chemistry has an exclusive publication licence for this journal copyright_licence: The accepted version of this article will be made freely available after a 12 month embargo period history: Received 29 July 2014; Accepted 27 August 2014; Accepted Manuscript published 2 September 2014; Advance Article published 18 September 2014; Version of Record published 9 October 2014status: publishe