“…Thus, our results highlight that high sensitivity coupled with reusability, long-life storage and reproducibility could be accomplished by ZrN SERS substrate fabricated by the RGT rf magnetron sputtering. To achieve a higher SERS performance based on ZrN, the increase of the hot spot density on the surface is the major issue which could be possibly done by using nanoarrays, nano template and nanostructure synthesis [7,9,[40][41][42] to increase the amount of LSPR on surface of ZrN SERS substrate. However, the ability to precisely control the desired stoichiometry, crystallinity, morphological structure, and texture orientation of ZrN prepared via such methods is the critical challenge to gaining hot spot density on the surface of ZrN SERS substrate for achieving high performance SERS substrate.…”