The structural basis for giant enhancement enabling single-molecule Raman scattering

The structural basis for giant enhancement enabling single-molecule Raman scattering.

We find that giant surface-enhanced Raman scattering for adsorbates on silver surfaces is present only on surfaces that exhibit self-similar fractal topology as inferred from atomic force microscopy. The fractal character results in localizing the energy of incident photons to volumes of a few nanometers on a side, millions of times smaller than the diffraction limit. Consistent with this findi...

Giant Raman enhancement on nanoporous gold film by conjugating with nanoparticles for single-molecule detection

Raman Scattering From a Single Molecule between Two Metal Nanoparticles

The ability to perform optical sectioning is one of the great advantages of laserscanning microscopy, be it confocal or multiphoton microscopy. This comes however, at a cost of long image acquisition times, of an order of tens of milliseconds, due to the serial acquisition of data points. We show that by introducing spatiotemporal pulse shaping techniques it is possible to obtain full-frame dep...

Single Molecule Detection Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS)

Katrin Kneipp, Yang Wang,* Harald Kneipp, Lev T. Perelman, Irving Itzkan, Ramachandra R. Dasari, and Michael S. Feld George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Department of Physics, Technical University of Berlin, D 10623 Berlin, Germany (Received 6 November 1996) By exploiting the extremely large effective cross sections (...

Enhancement factor distribution around a single surface-enhanced Raman scattering hot spot and its relation to single molecule detection.

We provide the theoretical framework to understand the phenomenology and statistics of single molecule (SM) signals arising in surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) under the presence of so-called electromagnetic hot spots. We show that most characteristics of the SM-SERS phenomenon can be tracked down to the presence of a tail-like (power law) distribution of enhancements and we propose a s...