Approaching the electromagnetic mechanism of surface-enhanced Raman scattering: from self-assembled arrays to individual gold nanoparticles
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 6, 2026
Tracking Electrochemistry on Single Nanoparticles with Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Spectroscopy and Microscopy
Published on: May 12, 2023
Lianming Tong1, Tao Zhu, Zhongfan Liu
1Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has been intensively explored both in theory and applications and has been widely used in chemistry, physics and biology for decades. A variety of SERS substrates have been developed in order to investigate the mechanisms behind, which give rise to the enormous enhancement even enabling single molecule detection. The Raman enhancement, which involves an electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and a chemical enhancement (CM), reflects both the physical principle of light/metal interactions and the molecule/metal interactions. In this tutorial review, we focus on the EM enhancement of SERS active substrates made of colloidal gold nanoparticles (GNPs), varying from self-assembled arrays down to single particles, for the purpose of investigating the EM coupling effect and probing the distribution of the induced electric field of single GNPs.
