Size effects in the structural phase transition of VO2 nanoparticles studied by surface-enhanced Raman scattering

We report the first experimental application of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) to the study of the structural phase transition of vanadium dioxide (VO2). Using arrays of gold-capped VO2 nanoparticles (Au + VO2 NPs) and a VO2 film covered with Au islands, we obtained the temperature evolution of the SERS intensity with respect to the amount of accessible material across the monoclinic-tetragonal-monoclinic transformation cycle of VO2. The smallest Au + VO2 NPs displayed the largest deviations from the bulk transition temperatures to complete the transformation, resulting in the widest thermal hysteresis, while the Au + VO2 film exhibited the narrowest hysteresis. The observed size dependence agrees qualitatively with the model of defect-induced nucleation of the VO2 transition, although the magnitude of the hysteresis width and its dependence on NP size were less pronounced than those in a previous study of elastic light scattering from bare VO2 NPs. The discrepancies may stem from the creation of extrinsic nucleation sites in the VO2 NPs during their high-temperature processing in the presence of the Au caps; alternatively, the hystereses of the structural and electronic transitions could each have a different dependence on size. Lastly, we correlate the size dependence of the VO2 SERS intensity with the scattering efficiency of the Au nanoparticles, within the framework of a modified Mie-theory calculation.