Resonant excitation of tip plasmons for tip-enhanced Raman SNOM

The conditions necessary for the optimisation of tip-enhanced scanning near-field optical microscopy have been determined. The Raman scattering efficiency can be enormously increased by enhancements in the local field amplitude, such as that which can occur in the vicinity of a metallic nanostructure. The field enhancement in the vicinity of a silver tip is investigated theoretically here using the finite difference time domain method. Field enhancements from electron oscillations on the tip are shown to display strong maxima at resonant illumination wavelengths and the nature of these enhancements at the substrate surface beneath the tip, both on and off resonance, has been calculated. The enhancement of the Raman signal on the surface decreases exponentially as the tip-substrate separation is increased and a peak Raman enhancement of 10(7) is theoretically achievable at a tip-surface separation of 2 nm. The resolution is also strongly related to the distance between the tip and the substrate surface narrowing to < 7 nm, significantly smaller than the radius of curvature of the end of the tip. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.