Combined dielectric and plasmon resonance for giant enhancement of Raman scattering

Abstract

Combined dielectric/metal resonators for colossal enhancement of inelastic light scattering are developed and their properties are investigated. It is shown that a record enhancement factor of 2 × 10⁸ can be obtained using these structures. The dielectric resonators are fabricated on Si/SiO₂ substrates where periodic arrays of square 10- to 200-nm-high dielectric pillars are produced via electron-beam lithography and plasma etching. The lateral size a of the pillars varies between 50 and 1500 nm, and their period in the array is 2a. To make a combined dielectric/metal resonator, a nanostructured layer of silver is deposited onto the fabricated periodic dielectric structure by thermal evaporation. It is established that, for a fixed height of the dielectric pillars, the Raman scattering enhancement factor experiences pronounced oscillations as a function of the period (and size) of the pillars. It is shown that these oscillations are determined by the modes of the dielectric resonator and governed by the relation between the excitation laser wavelength and the planar size of the dielectric pillars.