A general strategy to incorporate a wide range of metallic salts into ring-like organized nanostructures via polymer self-assembly

A new approach for surface nanostructuring was innovated by means of metallic nanoparticles organized in a thin homopolymer film (PMMA) on a silicon substrate. The originality of this simple self-assembly is that a film of polymer drilled by metallic nanoparticle (MNP) rings was fabricated in one step, in addition no reducing agent was used nor was preliminary functionalization of the surface carried out. Moreover, the deep understanding of the self-assembly mechanism and the influence of various physicochemical parameters involved tend to introduce into the fabrication process a wide range of metallic salts "Mn+(NO3-)(n)" where Mn+ is Ag+, Au3+, Mn2+, Mg2+, Cr3+, Cu2+, Ni2+, Eu3+, Pr3+, Nd3+, Sm3+, Tb3+, Dy3+, Tm3+, Ca2+, Fe3+, Co2+, Zn2+, Al3+. Finally, to illustrate the potential of our nanofabrication approach, an example of the SERS application of Silver NPs is given, where the detection limit of crystal violet was shown to reach 10(-15) M.