| Abstract
| - A universal metal−molecule−metal sandwich architecture by the self-assembly of Ag nanoparticles (NPs)and Au NPs of various shapes interconnected with 4-aminothiophenol (4-ATP) molecules was presented.These Ag NPs/4-ATP/Au NPs sandwich structures were characterized by surface enhanced Raman scattering(SERS) using an off-surface plasmon resonance condition. Enhancement factors (EF) on the order of 108 for9b(b2) vibration mode were observed for the 4-ATP self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) in such sandwichstructures. The factors are 2 orders of magnitude larger than that on the monolayer of Au NPs of variousshapes under similar condition. More importantly, remarkable increase in the intensity of b2 vibrational modes,which is characteristic of the charge transfer (CT) behavior between metal NPs and 4-ATP molecules, wasobserved in these sandwich structures under 1064 nm excitation. The obtained EF on these sandwich structurefor 9b(b2) is larger than that for 7a vibration mode by a factor of ∼102, demonstrating the importance of thecontribution of the CT mechanism and the CT behavior of metal contacts, which play a significant role inmetal−molecule−metal nanosystems. Moreover, enhancement factors depend on the shape of the Au NPsand vary by a factor of 8.
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