Investigating SERS of Electrogenic Bacteria Via Charge Transfer Enhancement By Graphene Quantum Dots (GQDs)

We report on the enhancement of the phononic excitation in electrogenic bacteria due to the electron transfer to interfaced graphene quantum dots (GQDs). This phenomenon enables GQDs to detect otherwise unobservable bacterial Raman peaks by chemeo-phononic amplification by a factor of ten. We show confirmation of the charge transfer ability of the electrogenic bacteria into GQD and provides a platform for chemical enhancement phenomena for biological sensing at the cellular level. This study also reports on the electrogenic bacteria’s phonon-polarization directly related to the chemical enhancement from the GQDs.