IEEE Photonics Journal (Jan 2015)

Ultrahigh Enhancement Factor by Using a Silver Nanoshell With a Gain Core Above a Silver Substrate for Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering at the Single-Molecule Level

  • Jun Song,
  • Jinhong Xian,
  • Minghuai Yu,
  • Dong Wang,
  • Shuai Ye,
  • Hanben Niu,
  • Xiao Peng,
  • Junle Qu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/JPHOT.2015.2481599
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 5
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

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Single-molecule surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has been extensively studied over the past decade. In this paper, we propose a novel method to obtain ultrahigh enhancement of local electric fields by using a silver nanoshell with a gain core above a silver substrate. Numerical results show that an ultrahigh enhancement factor of the local electric field on the order of 105-106 and a SERS enhancement factor on the order of 1020-1025 can be obtained with the present system. The SERS enhancement factor is five orders of magnitude greater than the highest theoretical value reported for SERS applications at the single-molecule level. In addition, we use the finite-element method to analyze in detail the influences of the gain coefficient of the gain core and the other structure parameters on the enhancement factor.

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