SERS Engineering Collaboration
Abstract
We performed research on the design and realization of high performance substrates for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), and elucidated the role of chemical interactions between analyte molecules and a plasmonic substrate, the so-called "chemical effect." Two approaches were taken for the realization of high performance SERS substrates. In the first, metal nanostructures supporting surface plasmons were fabricated by electron beam lithography. We demonstrated that by optimizing the design of metallic nanostructures, the average enhancement factor (EF) for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) could be as large as 8.4x10^8. The angular dependencies of the local field enhancement and the Raman emission enhancement were also investigated. We demonstrated that a stronger SERS signal resulted when the plasmonic substrate was illuminated with a collimated, rather than focused, laser beam. In the second approach, a pulsed laser was used to texture a silicon wafer to form sharp features. Silver was evaporated onto the wafer, and the resulting structures were found to exhibit very high SERS performance. In the theory effort, a comprehensive analysis of the chemical effect, including analytical and computational modeling, was accomplished.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA564666
Entities
People
- Alán Aspuru-Guzik
- Dongxing Wang
- Eric Mazur
- Kenneth B Crozier
- Mohamad Banaee
- Paul Peng
- Philip Munoz
- Semion Saikin
- Wenqi Zhu
- Yizhuo Chu
Organizations
- Harvard University