Over
the past decade, many efforts have been devoted to designing
and fabricating substrates for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
(SERS) with abundant hot spots to improve the sensitivity of detection.
However, there have been many difficulties involved in causing molecules
to enter hot spots actively or effectively. Here, we report a general
SERS method for actively capturing target molecules in small gaps
(hot spots) by constructing a nanocapillary pumping model. The ubiquity
of hot spots and the inevitability of molecules entering them lights
up all the hot spots and makes them effective. This general method
can realize the highly sensitive detection of different types of molecules,
including organic pollutants, drugs, poisons, toxins, pesticide residues,
dyes, antibiotics, amino acids, antitumor drugs, explosives, and plasticizers.
Additionally, in the dynamic detection process, an efficient and stable
signal can be maintained for 1–2 min, which increases the practicality
and operability of this method. Moreover, a dynamic detection process
like this corresponds to the processes of material transformation
in some organisms, so the method can be used to monitor transformation
processes such as the death of a single cell caused by photothermal
stimulation. Our method provides a novel pathway for generating hot
spots that actively attract target molecules, and it can achieve general
ultratrace detection of diverse substances and be applied to the study
of cell behaviors in biological systems.
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