Gold nanoflowers as efficient hot-spots for surface enhanced Raman   scattering
  Gold nanoflowers are known for their use as efficient host for surface enhanced Raman scattering of organic dye molecules. In this article, gold nanoflowers have been synthesised and rhodamine 6 G (R6G) molecules have been used as probe molecules. It is found that the gold nanoflowers can detect the presence of R6G molecules upto 10^{-10} M. The petals of these nanoflowers play an important role for the enhancement of Raman signals, and the intensity of Raman signals is enhanced many folds in presence of gold nanoflowers - the enhancement factor is of the order of 10^6. This is explained in terms of electromagnetic mechanism. 
Arun Singh Patel, Subhavna Juneja, Pawan K. Kanaujia, G.Vijaya   Prakash, Anirban Chakraborti and Jaydeep Bhattacharya
cond-mat.mtrl-sci