title: The influences of particle number on hot spots in strongly coupled metal nanoparticles chain.
abstract: In understanding of the hot spot phenomenon in single-molecule surface enhanced Raman scattering (SM-SERS), the electromagnetic field within the gaps of dimers (i.e., two particle systems) has attracted much interest as it provides significant field amplification over single isolated nanoparticles. In addition to the existing understanding of the dimer systems, we show in this paper that field enhancement within the gaps of a particle chain could maximize at a particle number N>2, due to the near-field coupled plasmon resonance of the chain. This particle number effect was theoretically observed for the gold (Au) nanoparticles chain but not for the silver (Ag) chain. We attribute the reason to the different behaviors of the dissipative damping of gold and silver in the visible wavelength range. The reported effect can be utilized to design effective gold substrate for SM-SERS applications.
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom. zengbo.wang@gmail.com
authors.forename: Z B
authors.initials: ZB
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: B S
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Luk'yanchuk
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: S P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Edwardson
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Whitehead
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Z
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: K G
authors.initials: KG
authors.lastname: Watkins