Modular assembly of plasmonic core-satellite structures as highly brilliant SERS-encoded nanoparticles

11 pags., 5 figs.-- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 3.0Herein, we present a fabrication approach that produces homogeneous core-satellite SERS encoded particles with minimal interparticle gaps (<2-3 nm) and maximum particle loading, while positioning the encoding agents at the gaps. Integration of plasmonic building blocks of different sizes, shapes, compositions, surface chemistries or encoding agents is achieved in a modular fashion with minimal modification of the general synthetic protocol. These materials present an outstanding optical performance with homogeneous enhancement factors over 4 orders of magnitude as compared with classical SERS encoded particles, which allows their use as single particle labels.This work was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (CTQ2017-88648R, RYC-2016-20331, and RYC2015-19107), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR883), the ˜ Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2017PFR-URV-B2-02), and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Banco Santander (2017EXIT-08)