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A new tactic that using Ag nanorice trimer as surface-enhanced hyper Raman scattering substrate is proposed for realizing maximum signal enhancement. In this paper, we numerically simulate and theoretically analyze the optical properties of the nanorice trimer consisting of two short nanorices and a long nanorice. The Ag nanorice trimer can excite Fano resonance at optical frequencies based on the strong interaction between the bright and the dark mode. The bright mode is attributed to the first longitudinal resonance of the short nanorice pair, while the dark mode originates from the third longitudinal mode resonance of the long nanorice. The electric field distributions demonstrate that the two resonances with the largest field strength correspond to the first-order resonance of the long nanorice and the Fano resonance of the trimer, respectively. Two plasmon resonances with maximum electromagnetic field enhancements and same spatial hot spot regions can match spectrally with the pump and second-order Stokes beams of hyper Raman scattering, respectively, through reasonable design of the trimer structure parameters. The estimated enhancement factor of surface-enhanced hyper Raman scattering can achieve as high as 5.32 × 1013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A micro-structured gold surface, consisting of a periodic square-based anti-pyramidal array (Klarite) with a smooth boundary surface on which silver nanoparticles (diameter: 60 nm) were deposited, produced an active surface enhanced Raman scattering substrate. With p-aminothiophenol as a probe molecule, the Raman activity of the micro-structured surface was compared before and after deposition of the silver nanoparticles. Experimental results show that the Raman spectra on the silver/p-aminothiophenol/Klarite structure is stronger than that on the silver/p-aminothiophenol/gold film and the Raman spectra on the silver/p-aminothiophenol/gold film is stronger than that on silver/p-aminothiophenol, p-aminothiophenol/Klarite structure, p-aminothiophenol/gold film, which is confirmed by numerical simulations. A similar result is obtained with crystal violet as test molecule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sharp plasmonic Fano resonance is found to appear in a silver nanorod pair structure with broken length symmetry. It is shown that it arises from strong interference between a narrow plasmon mode of inter-nanorod near-field coupling and broad scattering from the nanorod. The inter-nanorod coupling is the result of the magnetic dipole plasmon resonance induced by the anti-parallel current of the nanorod pair, while the broad scattering is caused by electric dipole oscillation. The numerical results show that a giant local field enhancement (197), a high quality factor (52) and a sensing sensitivity of 1426 nm per refractive index unit in the symmetry-broken nanorod pair with a displacement Δl = 40 nm originated from a pronounced Fano resonance in the near-infrared spectrum. Huge local field enhancement and high sensitivity make this simple structure promising for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy and sensing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uniform and reproducible substrates for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) are fabricated by self-assembly of Ag nanoparticles (NPs) on 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane (APTES) modified glass. Experimental results indicate that the Ag NPs with a narrow size distribution were assembled as a sub-monolayer which exhibits an excellent SERSactivity. The SERS enhancement factor is estimated to be 7.5 × 10 and the detection limit for crystal violet (CV) solution is about ∼10 M. The uniformity and reproducibility of the SERS signals are tested by point-to-point and batch-to-batch measurements. It is confirmed that the self-assembled Ag NPs substrates has a high SERS reproducibility and a low standard deviation with respect to the Ag NPs on non-functionalized glass substrates. The self-assembled Ag NPs substrates can be widely used for the application of chemical and biochemical sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]