Abstract
This paper reports the employment of carboxyl groups on polystyrene beads surface to generate high aspect ratio (HSR) nano-extrutions by plasma etching for enhancing SERS signal. We investigate the detail mechanism of the surface corrugation formation on PSBs and propose a novel method to produce HSR surface nano-extrutions on carboxyl-rich PSBs surface. By understanding the mechanism of the surface corrugation formation, we can control the HSR. Therefore, a 4-fold Raman signal enhancement was achieved when compared to the result by previous method, using oxygen plasma to generate corrugation surface on PSBs without carboxyl groups.