The
discovery of the enhancement of Raman scattering by molecules
adsorbed on nanostructured metal surfaces is a landmark in the history
of spectroscopic and analytical techniques. Significant experimental
and theoretical effort has been directed toward understanding the
surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect and demonstrating
its potential in various types of ultrasensitive sensing applications
in a wide variety of fields. In the 45 years since its discovery,
SERS has blossomed into a rich area of research and technology, but
additional efforts are still needed before it can be routinely used
analytically and in commercial products. In this Review, prominent
authors from around the world joined together to summarize the state
of the art in understanding and using SERS and to predict what can
be expected in the near future in terms of research, applications,
and technological development. This Review is dedicated to SERS pioneer
and our coauthor, the late Prof. Richard Van Duyne, whom we lost during
the preparation of this article.
We report in this Account the design of chromophore-functionalized metal nanoparticles and the detailed investigation of the ground- and excited-state interactions between the metal nanoparticles and the photoactive molecules. The methodologies adopted for organizing chromophore-functionalized gold nanoparticles on two-dimensional surfaces and the mechanistic details of various deactivation channels of the photoexcited chromophores, such as energy and electron transfer to the metal nanoparticle, are presented. The possible applications of such chromophore-functionalized gold nanoparticles in photovoltaics, light-mediated binding and release of biologically important molecules such as amino acid derivatives, and fluorescent display devices are described.
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