Fabrication of functional silver nanobowl arrays via sphere lithography

We report a low-cost and high-throughput method to fabricate large-area silver nanobowl arrays via thermal evaporation of silver on a self-assembled monolayer of nanospheres. The nanobowl array is a hierarchical structure, composed of silver nanoparticles with average diameter size of ca.10 nm, which can serve as a reaction container and catalyst. The optical absorption spectra indicates that surface plasmon resonance of silver nanoparticles exists on the nanobowl array, and it can serve as an excellent surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-active substrate.