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Recently, vanadium oxides and other semiconductor substrates have been intensively studied for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy due to their advantages such as greater uniformity, stability, and measurement reproducibility compared to plasmonic substrates. Combining vanadium oxide substrates with nanostructures of various noble metals has shown promise for enhancing the signal while retaining the previously mentioned advantages. We prepared the substrates for SERS measurements using a novel plasma-based gas aggregation technique, where a silicon wafer was coated with a vanadium pentoxide/metal (Au) composite. In SERS spectroscopy using methylene blue as a testing analyte, we observed a significant enhancement from vanadium pentoxide/Au composite compared to vanadium oxide substrates without noble metals while maintaining spectral stability. These measurements demonstrate the promising potential of vanadium oxide substrates in combination with metal nanostructures for achieving higher signal enhancements and suggest that further research and exploration of alternative material combinations and shapes of nanostructures are promising for advancements in this field.
Keywords: SERS, heterogeneous nanostructures, plasma-based deposition, vanadium oxide© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.