Design of an ultra-sensitive gold nanorod colorimetric sensor and its application based on formaldehyde reducing Ag+

Jin-Mei Lin; Yi-Qun Huang; Zhen-bo Liu; Chang-Qing Lin; Xudong Ma; Jia-Ming Liu

doi:10.1039/C5RA16266A

Design of an ultra-sensitive gold nanorod colorimetric sensor and its application based on formaldehyde reducing Ag⁺†

Jin-Mei Lin,^a Yi-Qun Huang,^ab Zhen-bo Liu,^c Chang-Qing Lin,^d Xudong Ma^b and Jia-Ming Liu*^a

* Corresponding authors

^a College of Chemistry and Environmental, Minnan Normal University, Zhangzhou, P. R. China
E-mail: zzsyliujiaming@163.com
Tel: +86 596 2591352

^b Zhangzhou Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University, Zhangzhou, P. R. China

^c The Third Hospital of Xiamen, Xiamen, P. R. China

^d Department of Food and Biological Engineering, Zhangzhou Institute of Technology, Zhangzhou, P. R. China

Abstract

Formaldehyde (HCHO) could reduce Ag⁺ to Ag on the surface of gold nanorods (AuNRs) to form Au core–Ag shell nanorods (Au@AgNRs) in a AuNRs–Ag⁺–HCHO system, which caused the dielectric function to change, the longitudinal plasmon absorption band (LPAB) of AuNRs to redshift (Δλ_LPAB) and the color of the solution to change obviously. Thus, a responsive, simple, sensitive and selective AuNRs colorimetric sensor for the determination of HCHO has been developed based on the linear relationship between Δλ_LPAB and the concentration of HCHO. The limit of detection (LOD) of this sensor is 6.3 × 10⁻¹¹ (g mL⁻¹), which is much lower than that of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), showing its high sensitivity. What's more, the sensor has been applied to the detection of HCHO in water samples with the results agreeing well with resonance fluorescence spectrometry, showing its great practicality. Furthermore, the morphological changes of AuNRs and Au@AgNRs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and the sensing mechanism for the detection of HCHO was also discussed.

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Article information

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/C5RA16266A
Article type: Paper
Submitted: 12 Aug 2015
Accepted: 14 Oct 2015
First published: 10 Nov 2015

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RSC Adv., 2015,5, 99944-99950

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Design of an ultra-sensitive gold nanorod colorimetric sensor and its application based on formaldehyde reducing Ag⁺

J. Lin, Y. Huang, Z. Liu, C. Lin, X. Ma and J. Liu, RSC Adv., 2015, 5, 99944 DOI: 10.1039/C5RA16266A

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