Fabrication of gold tips suitable for tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

The authors report on a simple method of fabricating gold tips, suitable for use in a shear-force mode atomic force microscope for tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS). The proposed electrochemical method is highly optimized and offers five advantages: produces a low-aspect ratio tip that can withstand the lateral force at the end of the tip during scanning, produces a sharp tip end to generate good Raman enhancements for TERS, a self-terminating process that makes the etching process easy, use of inexpensive electronic systems so that it can be adopted by any laboratory, and less time consuming (takes less than 20 s to fabricate a single tip). This article demonstrates TERS imaging using such tips. (C) 2008 American Vacuum Society.