An optimal substrate design for SERS: dual-scale diamond-shaped gold nano-structures fabricated via interference lithography. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Dual-scale diamond-shaped gold nanostructures (d-DGNs) with larger scale diamond-shaped gold nanoposts (DGNs) coupled to smaller scale gold nanoparticles have been fabricated via interference lithography as a highly reliable and efficient substrate for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The inter- and intra-particle plasmonic fields of d-DGNs are varied by changing the periodicity of the DGNs and the density of gold nanoparticles. Because of the two different length scales in the nanostructures, d-DGNs show multipole plasmonic peaks as well as dipolar plasmonic peaks, leading to a SERS enhancement factor of greater than 10(9). Simulations are carried out by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods to evaluate the dependence of the inter- and intra-particle plasmonic field and the results are in good agreement with the experimentally obtained data. Our studies reveal that the combination of two different length scales is a straightforward approach for achieving reproducible and great SERS enhancement by light trapping in the diamond-shaped larger scale structures as well as efficient collective plasmon oscillation in the small size particles.

published proceedings

  • Nanoscale

author list (cited authors)

  • Ahn, H., Thiyagarajan, P., Jia, L., Kim, S., Yoon, J., Thomas, E. L., & Jang, J.

citation count

  • 51

complete list of authors

  • Ahn, Hyo-Jin||Thiyagarajan, Pradheep||Jia, Lin||Kim, Sun-I||Yoon, Jong-Chul||Thomas, Edwin L||Jang, Ji-Hyun

publication date

  • March 2013