Abstract

The discovery of the giant enhancement of Raman scattering from single molecules via surface plasmon [1,2] had a transformative impact on spectroscopy and chemical analysis. Surface- and tip-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS/TERS) have since then become major fields of research and are routinely employed in physical chemistry, material science and even in clinical settings. Over the past decades a range of theories have been developed to describe the scattering of the amplified Raman signal. Electromagnetic theory has been able to associate large enhancements to enhanced near-fields spots [3,4]. But considering only the electromagnetic factor, conventional models fail to account for all experimental observations.

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