Influence of the Number of Nanoparticles on the Enhancement Properties of Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Active Area: Sensitivity versus Repeatability

In the present work, the combination of chemical immobilization with electron beam lithography enables the production of sensitive and reproducible SERS-active areas composed of stochastic arrangements of gold nanoparticles. The number of nanoparticles was varied from 2 to 500. Thereby a systematic analysis of these SERS-active areas allows us to study SERS efficiency as a function of the number of nanoparticles. We found that the experimental parameters are critical, in particular the size of the SERS-active area must be comparable to the effective area of excitation to obtained reproducible SERS measurements. The sensitivity has also been studied by deducing the number of NPs that generat…