Fabrication of Au and Ag – Coated AFM probes for tip-enhanced raman spectroscopy

Abstract

In this work, approaches for fabrication metal coated probes for Tip Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (TERS) are considered. It was proposed to use optical characterization of probes to achieve the effective TERS of semiconductor nanoobjects. The shape and size of the metal cluster at the tip apex determines the position of the localized surface plasmon resonance, the electromagnetic field enhancement and, thus, TERS performance. The possibility of optimizing the characteristics of the probes for TERS studies of nanoobjects has been investigated.