Latest paper: single nanoaperture SERS

7 Octobre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Recent research work

My team has released an article in the October 7th issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

A wide range of studies had been recently devoted to nanoaperture arrays as substrates to enhance the Raman scattering spectrocopy of adsorbed molecules. However, only partial information is known concerning the case of a single nanoaperture. Our paper fills this gap, and discusses the first quantitative evaluation of the SERS enhancement factors on single nanoapertures milled in optically thick gold films.

This work has three major aspects of interest to the SERS community: 

1) Nanoapertures milled in noble metal films form interesting SERS substrates thanks to their rational and tunable design, controlled surface enhancement, and intrinsic robustness. We discuss the different design parameters yielding to optimum SERS enhancement already in a single aperture which can be used to further improve the SERS substrates with nanoaperture arrays.

2) We discuss different ways of expressing the SERS enhancement factor, and show excellent agreement between experimental results and numerical simulations.

3) Most experimental studies of controlled SERS substrates skip the issue of the adhesion layer between the gold nanostructure and the glass substrate. We experimentally demonstrate that the adhesion layer has a crucial effect on the SERS enhancement, and needs to be fully considered while designing nanosubstrates for high-sensitivity spectroscopy.

A reprint for personal use only is freely available here.

 

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