Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering: Introduction and Applications (original) (raw)

Scattering of light by molecules can be elastic, Rayleigh scattering, or inelastic, Raman scattering. In the elastic scattering, the photon’s energy and the state of the molecule after the scattering events are unchanged. Hence, Rayleigh scattered light does not contain much information on the structure of molecular states. In inelastic scattering, the frequency of monochromatic light changes upon interaction with the vibrational states, or modes, of a molecule. With the advancement in the laser sources, better and compact spectrometers, detectors, and optics Raman spectroscopy have developed as a highly sensitive technique to probe structural details of a complex molecular structure. However, the low scattering cross section (10−31) of Raman scattering has limited the applications of the conventional Raman spectroscopy. With the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in 1973 by Martin Fleischmann, the interest of the research community in Raman spectroscopy as an ana...