Plasmonic dimer antennas for surface enhanced Raman scattering

Electron beam induced deposition (EBID) has recently been developed into a method to directly write optically active three-dimensional nanostructures. For that purpose a metal-organic precursor gas (here dimethyl-gold(III)-acetylacetonate) is introduced into the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope where it is cracked by the focused electron beam. Upon cracking the aforementioned precursor gas, 3D deposits are realized consisting of gold nanocrystals embedded in a carbonaceous matrix. The carbon content in the deposits hinders direct plasmonic applications. However, it is possible to activate the deposited nanostructures for plasmonics by coating the EBID structures with a continuous silver layer of a few nanometer thickness. Within this silver layer collective motions of the free electron gas can be excited. In this way, EBID structures with their intriguing precision at the nanoscale have been arranged in arrays of free-standing dimer antenna structures with nanometer sized gaps between the antennas that face each other with an angle of 90. These dimer antenna ensembles can constitute a reproducibly manufacturable substrate for exploiting the surface enhanced Raman effect (SERS). The achieved SERS enhancement factors are of the order of 104 for the incident laser light being polarized along the dimer axes. To prove the signal enhancement in a Raman experiment we used the dye methyl violet as a robust test molecule. In future applications the thickness of such a silver layer onto the dimer-antennas can easily be varied for tuning the plasmonic resonances of the SERS-substrate to match the resonance structure of the analytes to be detected.