TY - JOUR A1 - Heck, Christian A1 - Kanehira, Y. A1 - Kneipp, Janina A1 - Bald, Ilko T1 - Amorphous Carbon Generation as a Photocatalytic Reaction on DNA-Assembled Gold and Silver Nanostructures N2 - Background signals from in situ-formed amorphous carbon, despite not being fully understood, are known to be a common issue in few-molecule surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Here, discrete gold and silver nanoparticle aggregates assembled by DNA origami were used to study the conditions for the formation of amorphous carbon during SERS measurements. Gold and silver dimers were exposed to laser light of varied power densities and wavelengths. Amorphous carbon prevalently formed on silver aggregates and at high power densities. Time-resolved measurements enabled us to follow the formation of amorphous carbon. Silver nanolenses consisting of three differently-sized silver nanoparticles were used to follow the generation of amorphous carbon at the single-nanostructure level. This allowed observation of the many sharp peaks that constitute the broad amorphous carbon signal found in ensemble measurements. In conclusion, we highlight strategies to prevent amorphous carbon formation, especially for DNA-assembled SERS substrates. KW - Amorphous carbon KW - DNA origami KW - SERS KW - Nanoparticle dimers KW - Nanolenses PY - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-486484 SN - 1420-3049 VL - 24 IS - 12 SP - Article Number: 2324-1 EP - 10 PB - MDPI AN - OPUS4-48648 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -