Sulfur doped MoO2 hollow nanospheres as a highly sensitive SERS substrate for multiple detections of organic pollutants

The residual organic pollutants in the environment do great harm to the human body and ecological environment. The surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique has the characteristics of a simple pretreatment method, rapid detection, high sensitivity, high specificity and great stability in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAnalytical methods Vol. 13; no. 24; pp. 2679 - 2687
Main Authors Zhou, Xiaoyu, Zhao, Xiaoli, Gu, Shuo, Xie, Fazhi, Wang, Xiufang, Tang, Zhi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Royal Society of Chemistry 01.01.2021
Subjects
Coupling (molecular)
Detection limits
Doping
Electromagnetic coupling
Electronics industry
Ethanol
Methylene blue
Molybdenum oxides
Nanospheres
Noble metals
Pollutants
Pollution detection
Raman spectra
Raman spectroscopy
Reducing agents
Rhodamine 6G
Sensitivity
Substrates
Sulfur
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Summary:The residual organic pollutants in the environment do great harm to the human body and ecological environment. The surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique has the characteristics of a simple pretreatment method, rapid detection, high sensitivity, high specificity and great stability in the detection of organic pollutants. In this study, sulfur-doped MoO2 nanospheres (S-MoO2) with a hollow structure were synthesized by a simple hydrothermal reduction of MoO3 using ethanol as a reductant and thiourea as a dopant source. Profiting from the S atom doping, MoO2 manifests high SERS sensitivity to model organic pollutants such as rhodamine B (RhB), rhodamine 6G (R6G) and methylene blue (MB) with detection limits as low as 10−9, 10−10 and 10−8 M, respectively. A maximum enhancement factor (EF) of 6.2 × 107 is obtained with R6G molecules on S-MoO2 (2 wt%). Based on the experimental results and theoretical calculations, the high SERS sensitivity can be attributed to the enhanced plasmonic effects of MoO2 due to the electron-rich S atom doping, which lead to the strong electromagnetic coupling between substrates and target molecules. This study provides a new method for enhancing the SERS performance of MoO2 and this method may also be applicable to other non-noble metal semiconductors.
ISSN:1759-9660
1759-9679
DOI:10.1039/d1ay00502b