Plasmonic silvered nanostructures on macroporous silicon decorated with graphene oxide for SERS-spectroscopy.

A method for fabricating surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-active substrates by immersion deposition of silver on a macroporous silicon (macro-PS) template with pore diameters and depth ranging from 500-1000 nm is developed. The procedure for the formation of nanostructured silver films in the layers of macro-PS was optimized. Silver particles of dimensions in the nano- and submicron-scale were formed on the external surface of the macro-PS immersed in the water-ethanol solution of AgNO3, while the inner pore walls were covered by smaller, 10-30 nm diameter, silver nanoparticles. Upon introducing the hydrofluoric acid to the reaction mixture, the size of nanoparticles grown on the pore walls increased up to 100-150 nm. Such nanostructures were found to yield SERS-signal intensities from CuTMpyP4 analyte molecules of the same order to those obtained from silvered mesoporous silicon reported previously. The tested storage stability for the silvered macro-PS-based samples reached up to 8 months. However, degradation of the SERS intensity under illumination by the laser beam during spectral measurements was observed. To improve the stability of the SERS-signal a hybrid structure involving graphene oxide deposited on the top of analyte molecules adsorbed on the Ag/macro-PS was formed. A systematic observation of the time evolution of the characteristic peak at 1365 cm-1 showed that the addition of the oxidized graphene layer over the analyte results in ∼2 times slower decay of the Raman intensity, indicating that the graphene coating can be used to enhance the stability of the SERS-signal from the CuTMpyP4 molecules.

Radiation and scattering from imperfect cylindrical electromagnetic cloaks.

The design of electromagnetic invisibility cloaks is based on singular mappings prescribing zero or infinite values for material parameters on the inner surface of the cloak. Since this is only approximately feasible, an asymptotic analysis is necessary for a sound description of cloaks. We adopt a simple and effective approach for analyzing electromagnetic cloaks - instead of the originally proposed singular mapping, nonsingular mappings asymptotically approaching the ideal one are considered. Scattering and radiation from this type of imperfect cylindrical cloaks is solved analytically and the results are confirmed by full-wave finite element simulations. Our analysis sheds more light on the influence of this kind of imperfection on the cloaking performance and further explores the physics of cloaking devices.