LAUSR

Abstract Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), as a powerful tool that its sensitive to detect organics hazardous pollutants and analyze the plasmon-driven catalysis reaction with its fingerprint characteristics. And the SERS property of substrate can be effectively enhanced with charge-transferring between the substrate and analyte by utilizing the borrowing SERS activity strategy. Considering the transition metal elements represent multiple valence states, the synergistic interaction of noble metal/transition metal oxides heterostructures can be further modulated with oxygen contents variation of transition metal oxides. In this work, we report the fabrication of high specific area Sn3O4 hollow hierarchical nanostructures with a simple hydrothermal method, which have mixed-valence of Sn2+ and Sn4+. And the composites were prepared with Au coating and the SERS properties of the nanostructures were investigated by detection of rhodamine 6G. The effect of the oxygen content of the transition metal oxides on their SERS performance was analyzed with annealing process. It was found that a high oxygen atomic ratio induced by heat treatment increased the SERS effect of the Au-coated nanostructures for R6G molecules. This property may prove to be very useful in the future research on the borrowing SERS activity of composites of noble metals and metal oxides.