In this article, the electromagnetic (EM) field in gap‐mode tip‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) is investigated theoretically and experimentally for a range of commonly used and unusual metal and nonmetal substrates. By approaching a metal tip to a substrate, both form a coupled system that confines the EM field created at the tip apex. The influence of the substrate onto the EM field enhancement is observed in a top‐illumination gap‐mode TERS setup for different metal substrates. These include Au, the most commonly used substrate, and also a wide range of rarely or previously unused TERS substrates (Cu, Ag, Al, Pd, Pt, Ni, Ti, Mo, W, stainless steel, Al2O3, SiO2). Self‐assembled monolayers of thiols and brilliant cresyl blue thin film samples are investigated experimentally on nine metal substrates, all showing considerable TERS enhancement. With finite difference time domain and finite element simulations used, the article provides a good estimate of the EM field enhancement for a wide range of substrates for users to estimate how well a substrate of choice will perform in a gap‐mode TERS experiment. The reduction in EM field strength |E2| compared with Au is less than an order of magnitude for many metals (Calculations: Cu 92%, Ag 81%, Ni 53%). This article experimentally shows that a wide variety of conductive substrates can be used, when one is willing to trade a fraction of the EM field enhancement. TERS was seen on all metal substrates including stainless steel, yet quantification was not always possible. These qualitative results were complemented with intensities from calculations. The wider variety of substrates will increase the applicability of TERS and evolve it one step further towards use in standard analytics. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1] We present a method for extracting spatially resolved water content profiles q(x) from a two-wire time domain reflectometry (TDR) probe. The profile q(x) is represented in terms of the dielectric e r (x) and ohmic s(x) properties in the longitudinal direction of the TDR probe. We solve the inverse problem iteratively by combining a one-dimensional time domain solution of the transmission line equations and a genetic optimization method. The method is capable of finding the global optimum in a complicated error landscape without initial assumptions, except physically reasonable limits. The method utilizes both the position and the magnitude of the TDR signal. We analyze water content profiles from laboratory measurements and demonstrate that the achievable spatial resolution can be made as low as 2 cm and even smaller. The present implementation of the numerical code demonstrates the practical feasibility of spatially resolved water content profiles.

We introduce a 3-dimensional electromagnetic eigenmodal algorithm for the theoretical analysis of resonating nano-optical structures. The method, a variant of the Jacobi-Davidson algorithm, solves the electric field vector wave, or curl-curl, equation for the electromagnetic eigenmodes of resonant optical structures with a finite element method. In particular, the method includes transparent boundary conditions that enable the analysis of resonating structures in unbounded space. We demonstrate the performance of the method. First, we calculate the modes of several dielectric resonator antennas and compare them to theoretically determined results. Second, we calculate the modes of a nano-cuboid and compare them to theoretically determined results. Third, we numerically analyze spherical nanoparticles and compare the result to the theoretical Mie solution. Fourth, we analyze optical dipole antenna configurations in order to assess the method's capability for solving technologically relevant problems.

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