Fabrication and characterization of plasmonic nanopores for Raman detection of biomolecules

In the last two decades solid-state nanopores have been widely investigated for the development of efficient and functional sensing platforms that enable real-time identification of biomolecules and even sequencing. Besides the typical electrical readout, single solid-state nanopores have been integrated with plasmonic nanostructures to add additional sensing modalities by using optical techniques such as Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). However, these nanosensors often exhibit low throughput which limits their use for real biological applications. Here, a large area and low-cost approach to produce transferrable arrays of plasmonic nanopores is presented. The devices are characterized by optical measurements and tested for the detection of biomolecules by using SERS.