In chemical vapour deposition (CVD) of graphene, surface roughness and purity of the copper substrate are very crucial for obtaining uniform films. Even though electrochemical polishing is an effective technique for obtaininghomogeneous graphene films, most of the experiments adopt complex experimental parameters like electrolyte heating, stirring and use of additives for better results. These are not applicable to thin copper foils used in CVD of graphene. In the present study, a simple electrochemical procedure is developed for deposition of high-quality graphene films with good coverage. The depositions of graphene films on bare and polished copper foils for the same growth conditions are analysed using various microscopic techniques. The uniformly grown graphene on copper is then directly employed as a surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate along with plasmonic silver nanoparticles. A simple SERS substrate having a reasonable detection limit of 10$^{−10}$ M for R6G is achieved with uniform SERS signals over a large area. Thehomogeneity of SERS substrate can be attributed to the uniformity of the deposited graphene film. A simple and efficient SERS substrate using conventional methods is achieved through the incorporation of chemical vapour deposited graphene. The study covers the growth of CVD graphene film starting from substrate pre-treatment, various analyses of the film andfinally the application in SERS.

We report high pressure studies on an organic perchlorate system diglycine perchlorate (DGPCl) up to 15 GPa. Single crystals of DGPCl were studied using high pressure Raman spectroscopy, which show discontinuous spectral changes at two pressures across ${\sim}$1.8 and ${\sim}$9 GPa. While the low pressure phase transition is primarily governed by the reorientational changes in organic groups and the corresponding hydrogen bonds, the high pressure transition involves substantial changes in Raman spectroscopic features of the perchlorate group. The splitting of the characteristic and the most intense Raman mode, i.e., perchlorate symmetric stretching mode, above 9 GPa suggests modifications in perchlorate group local structure. The structural changes are found to be reversible upon pressure release.