Abstract:
Nanoporous anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) has become one of the most attractive engineered template
for sensing, drug delivery, catalysis, photonics, electronics, energy generation, and storage applications.
The formation of AAO is based on the low-cost self-ordering anodization of pure aluminium, which provides perpendicularly aligned, well-organized nanoporous structures with hexagonal symmetry. Due to
its distinctive physical and chemical characteristics, it has been widely examined for the development
of advanced, cheap, reproducible, and portable sensing devices. On the other hand, from the last few decades, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy has drawn a wide range of attention
because of its label-free detection capability and extreme sensitivity towards the detection of a lower
limit of analytes. The key barrier to the extensive use of SERS for regular recognition is the lack of reproducibility of the substrate (periodicity, surface roughness, thickness) as well as the signal (wavelength
position and intensity) which are significant for SERS applications. This paper provides a review of
AAO templates for the fabrication of reproducible SERS active substrate for sensing various kind of
molecules.
