The connection between plasmon decay dynamics and the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy background: Inelastic scattering from non-thermal and hot carriers
Published in Journal of Applied Physics, 2021
Authors: Shengxiang Wu, Oscar Hsu-Cheng Cheng, Boqin Zhao, Nicki Hogan, Annika Lee, Dong Hee Son $^\dagger$, and Matthew Sheldon $^\dagger$
In this paper, we propsed a mechanism to describe the background signal that people often observed in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. We previously assigned the anti-Stokes signal from plasmonic nanostructures to electronic temperatures, and in this work we extend the formalism to the Stokes region as well. In short, we believe the SERS signal is originated from the inelastic light scatteirngs due to electronic transition, which is convoluted with plasmonic resonance. With the excellent agreements between theory and experiments, we can now not only extract the surface temperature of plasmonic nanostructures, but also determine the damping rate of surface plasmon.