State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials (iChEM), Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
Published: November 2020
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Article Abstract
Dynamics are fundamental to all aspects of chemistry and play a central role in the mechanism and product distribution of a chemical reaction. All dynamic processes are influenced by the local environment, so it is of fundamental and practical value to understand the structure of the environment and the dynamics with nanoscale resolution. Most techniques for measuring dynamic processes have microscopic spatial resolution and can only measure the average behavior of a large ensemble of sites within their sampling volumes. Tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) is a powerful tool for overcoming this limitation due to its combination of high chemical specificity and spatial resolution that is on the nanometer scale. Adapting it for the study of dynamic systems remains a work in progress, but the increasing sophistication of TERS is making such studies more routine, and there are now growing efforts to use TERS to examine more complex processes. This Perspective aims to promote development in this area of research by highlighting recent progress in using TERS to understand reacting and dynamic systems, ranging from simple model reactions to complex processes with practical applications. We discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that TERS presents for future studies.
State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, College of Environment and Ecology, State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Department of Physics, iChEM, IKKEM, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has evolved significantly over fifty years into a powerful analytical technique. This review aims to achieve five main goals. (1) Providing a comprehensive history of SERS's discovery, its experimental and theoretical foundations, its connections to advances in nanoscience and plasmonics, and highlighting collective contributions of key pioneers.
An analytic model is used to calculate the Raman and fluorescence enhancement of a molecule in between two closely spaced gold nanospheres. Instead of using the conventional approach that only the dipolar plasmonic mode is considered, we calculate the electric field enhancement in the nanometre sized gap, by taking account of the higher order modes in one gold sphere, which couples to the dipolar mode of the other sphere. The experimental confirmation is performed by gap-dependent tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) measurements.
Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDs) heterostructure, particularly the lateral heterostructure of two different TMDs, is gaining attention as ultrathin photonic devices based on the charge transfer (CT) excitons generated at the junction. However, the characteristics of the interface of the lateral heterostructure, determining the electronic band structure and alignment at the heterojunction region, have rarely been studied due to the limited spatial resolution of nondestructive analysis systems. In this study, we investigated the confined phonons resulting from the phonon-disorder scattering process involving multiple disorders at the lateral heterostructure interface of MoS-WS to prove the consequences of disorder-mediated deformation in the band structure.
Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and CAS Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
Resolving the sequence and structure of flexible biomolecules such as DNA is crucial to understanding their biological mechanisms and functions. Traditional structural biology methods remain challenging for the analysis of small and disordered biomolecules, especially those that are difficult to label or crystallize. Recent development of single-molecule tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) offers a label-free approach to identifying nucleobases in a single DNA chain.
Enhancing local field intensity through light field compression is one of the core issues in surface plasmon-enhanced spectroscopy. The theoretical framework for the nanostructure composed of a tip and a substrate has predominantly relied on classical electromagnetic models, ignoring the electron tunneling effect. In this paper, we investigate the plasmonic near-field characteristics in the sub-nanometer cavity formed by the tip and the substrate using a quantum-corrected model.
