title: Enhancement factor distribution around a single surface-enhanced Raman scattering hot spot and its relation to single molecule detection.
abstract: We provide the theoretical framework to understand the phenomenology and statistics of single molecule (SM) signals arising in surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) under the presence of so-called electromagnetic hot spots. We show that most characteristics of the SM-SERS phenomenon can be tracked down to the presence of a tail-like (power law) distribution of enhancements and we propose a specific model for it. We analyze, in the light of this, the phenomenology of SM-SERS and show how the different experimental manifestations of the effect reported in the literature can be analyzed and understood under a unified "universal" framework with a minimum set of parameters.
authors.affiliation: The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand. eric.leru@vuw.ac.nz
authors.forename: E C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Le Ru
authors.forename: P G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Etchegoin
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meyer