Single gold microshell tailored to sensitive surface enhanced Raman scattering probe.

We finely tuned the Au shell on a polystyrene microsphere of 2 microm in diameter to achieve a strong surface enhanced raman scattering (SERS)-active platform so that the molecules on a single microspherical shell surface produce their own fingerprint SERS spectra. The proposed microshells can be easily and individually manipulated under a conventional optical microscope using a micropipet and act as a sensitive probe to obtain the SERS spectra of the monolayer of molecules on Pt as well as Au surfaces without any requirement of special surface morphology or modification for inducing SERS activity. Well-defined SERS spectra can be obtained at a very short acquisition time of milliseconds, suggesting useful applications of the present system based on the decoding of the SERS-active barcodes on individually functionalized microshells.