300 mm Wafer-level, ultra-dense arrays of Au-capped nanopillars with sub-10 nm gaps as reliable SERS substrates.

The 193 nm deep UV immersion lithography is leveraged to fabricate highly dense and uniform arrays of Au-capped Si nanopillars on a 300 mm wafer level, and the substrates are applied in surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy for reliable molecule detection. Due to the sub-10 nm gap sizes and ultra-high array density with the lattice constant less than 100 nm, our nanopillar based substrates outperform the current commercial products in terms of the signal intensity, reproducibility and fabrication scale.