A research team composed of Tian Zhongqun s group (State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces and College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China) and Wang Zhonglin s group (School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA) has established a shell-isolated nanoparticle-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SHINERS), which has broken the long-standing limitations of SERS and obtained high quality Raman spectra for the first time on various molecules adsorbed at Pt and Au single-crystal surfaces with different facets in an electrochemical environment.
They have used the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (3D-FDTD) method to simulate the related enhancement, and the calculated results are in good agreement with experimental data. The concept of shell-isolated-nanoparticle enhancement may also be applicable to more general spectroscopy such as infrared spectroscopy, sum frequency generation and fluorescence, etc.
They have further studied the species on Si wafer, the components of cell walls and pesticide residues on orange fruit, and the results show that SHINERS can be widely applied in probing surface composition, adsorption and processes of diverse objects and morphologies. Recently, this work was published on Nature, and another paper introducing its scientific and practical significance was also published in the same issue.
The research has been carried out for five years under the support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
