Limits to surface-enhanced Raman scattering near arbitrary-shape scatterers

Mohammed Benzaouia; Jérôme Michon; Rasmus E. Christiansen; Wenjie Yao; Owen D. Miller; Ole Sigmund; Steven G. Johnson

doi:10.1117/12.2567352

20 August 2020 Limits to surface-enhanced Raman scattering near arbitrary-shape scatterers

Mohammed Benzaouia, Jérôme Michon, Rasmus E. Christiansen, Wenjie Yao, Owen D. Miller, Ole Sigmund, Steven G. Johnson

Proceedings Volume 11462, Plasmonics: Design, Materials, Fabrication, Characterization, and Applications XVIII; 114621R (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2567352
Event: SPIE Nanoscience + Engineering, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

Various scatterers such as rough surfaces or nanostructures are typically used to enhance the low efficiency of Raman spectroscopy (surface-enhanced Raman scattering). In this work, we find fundamental upper bounds on the Raman enhancement for arbitrary-shaped scatterers, depending only on its material constants and the separation distance from the molecule. According to our metric, silver is optimal in visible wavelengths while aluminum is better in the near-UV region. Our general analytical bound scales as the volume of the scatterer and the inverse sixth power of the distance to the active molecule. For periodic scatterers, a second bound with surface-area scaling is presented. Simple geometries such as spheres and bowties are shown to fall short of the bounds. However, using topology optimization based inverse design, we obtain surprising structures maximizing the Raman enhancement. These optimization results shed light to what extent our bounds are achievable.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Mohammed Benzaouia, Jérôme Michon, Rasmus E. Christiansen, Wenjie Yao, Owen D. Miller, Ole Sigmund, and Steven G. Johnson "Limits to surface-enhanced Raman scattering near arbitrary-shape scatterers", Proc. SPIE 11462, Plasmonics: Design, Materials, Fabrication, Characterization, and Applications XVIII, 114621R (20 August 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2567352

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