Recent advances of perovskite materials for surface enhanced Raman scattering and their applications

In recent years, all inorganic/organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites have attracted the increasing attention in solar cells, light-emitting devices, photodetectors, lasers, photocatalysis and other fields for their desirable optoelectronic properties. Profiting from the high charge carrier mobility, perovskites can provide a remarkable chemical enhancement effect, making them highly promising for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) applications. For the first time, a review on the recent advances of perovskite-based SERS substrates and their applications is rendered. The efforts and development in pure perovskite-based SERS substrates and perovskite/metallic material heterojunction-based hybrid SERS substrates are presented and discussed in detail. Moreover, several methods for optimizing SERS performance are also proposed. Furthermore, the applications of perovskite-based SERS technique have been presented and discussed in the special niche fields including depth detection of noncontact molecules, crystallinity evaluation of perovskite solar cell and detection of formaldehyde for environment monitoring. In the last section, a final conclusion of the research findings is summarized and potential challenges as well as outlooks are put forward to effectively guide future research. • For the first time, the recent advances of perovskite-based SERS are reviewed. • Perovskite can provide a remarkable chemical enhancement mechanism for SERS. • The crystalline phases of perovskites have significant effect on the SERS performances. • The SERS performance of pristine perovskites is much lower than engineered counterparts or perovskites/metal heterojunction. • The applications of perovskite-based SERS in detection of molecular depth, crystallinity of solar cell and formaldehyde.