Weiping Cai

By Yue Li, Shuyan Gao, Guotao Duan, Naoto Koshizaki and Weiping Cai

Part of the book: Advances in Unconventional Lithography

By Qian Zhao, Guangqiang Liu and Weiping Cai

Organophosphorus nerve agents, such as sarin, tabun, cyclosarin and soman, belong to the most toxic substances. So, it is very important to quickly detect it in trace-level and on-site or portable way. But, both fast and trace detections have been expected because current techniques are of low sensitivity or of poor selectivity and are time-consuming. The surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based detection could be a suitable and effective method. However, the organophosphorus nerve agents only very weakly interact with highly SERS-activated noble metal substrates and are hardly adsorbed on them. In this case, it is difficult to detect such molecules, with reproducible or quantitative measurements and trace level, by the normal SERS technique. Recently, there have been some works on the SERS-based detection of the organophosphorus molecules. In this chapter, we introduce the main progresses in this field, including (1) the thin water film confinement and evaporation concentrating strategy and (2) the surface modification and amidation reaction. These works provide new ways for highly efficient SERS-based detection of the organophosphorus nerve agents and some other target molecules that weakly interact with the coin metal substrates.

Part of the book: Raman Spectroscopy

By Haoming Bao, Hongwen Zhang, Guangqiang Liu and Weiping Cai

Ultrathin and uniform oxide layer-wrapped plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) have been expected in the fields of light energy conversion and optical sensing fields. In this chapter, we proposed a universal strategy to prepare such core-shell plasmonic NPs based on colloidal electrostatic attraction and self-assembly procedures. Based on the self-assembly strategy, laser ablation of metal targets in liquid medium was conducted at room temperature to one-pot fabricate the oxide-wrapped plasmonic NPs. It demonstrates that a series of core-shell nanostructured NPs such as Au@Fe2O3, Au@Al2O3, Au@CuO, Au@ZnO, Pt@TiO2, and Pd@TiO2, have been readily obtained free of contaminations. Technical analyses illustrate that those composite NPs possess uniform and symmetrical oxides layers with several nanometers in thickness. Furthermore, both the thickness and crystallinity of the oxides layer could be precisely tailored simply by controlling hydrolysis of precursors and irradiation durations. Finally, due to ultrathin wrapping of oxides, the as-obtained core-shell plasmonic NPs show excellent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and gas-sensing performances compared with bare metal or oxides NPs.

Part of the book: Plasmonics