Beamed Raman: directional excitation and emission enhancement in a plasmonic crystal double resonance SERS substrate

The angular dependencies of the local field enhancement and the Raman emission enhancement are investigated, numerically and experimentally, for a plasmonic crystal double resonance SERS substrate consisting of a periodic array of gold disks above a gold film. We find that the local field enhancement is very sensitive to the incident angle. The Raman emission enhancement has a strong angular dependence on the detection direction, with the substrate beaming the Raman emission so that different Raman lines have different far-field patterns. We demonstrate that a stronger SERS signal results when the plasmonic substrate is illuminated with a collimated, rather than focused, laser beam. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America