Sulfate-ion-assisted galvanic replacement tuning of silver dendrites to highly branched chains for effective SERS.

Morphology is a primary part of designing metal nanocrystals and nanomaterials with controlled functional properties. Here, we demonstrate the potential of foreign sulfate ions to tune the silver dendrites to highly branched chains through a simple galvanic replacement reaction without introducing any organic surfactants. We further illustrate the underlying mechanism according to diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) in the presence of sulfate ions. The special aspects of this simple synthetic strategy are the control of both the nucleation process and the subsequent crystal growth stage by using sulfate ions as the ionic surfactants thereby tuning the total surface energies on various crystal facets in solution and transforming crystal growth habits of the products. Moreover, the highly branched silver chains (HBSCs) with pure surfaces have been successfully employed as a Raman probe for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopic analysis of rhodamine 6G (R6G). The particular morphology of those HBSCs also makes them find potential applications in biosensing, catalysis and optics.