The use of gold nanoparticles has been demonstrated to catalyse the formation of oligothiophenes from terthiophene in solution using ferric chloride as the oxidizing agent. The structures of the resulting core-shell materials have been confirmed by electron microscopy and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Due to the lengthening of the conjugated backbone upon polymerization the SERS enhancement of the polymer increases as the interband electronic transition approaches resonance with the laser excitation. We believe that it should be possible to perform the polymerization of terthiophene in solution on the surface of AuNPs, the very high surface area of nanoparticles allows a much larger amount of material to be prepated.

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