FDTD Study on Evolution of Trimer Silver@Silica Nanospheres to Dimer for SERS Characteristics

Light enhancement occurs strongly within the plasmonic clusters by interaction with surface plasmons. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopic (SERS) characteristics of a series of silver@silica trimer core–shell (CS) nanosphere (NS) clusters are investigated in this paper. It is significant to understand the electric field (EF) enhancement mechanism behind the SERS technique. The effect of symmetry breaking is studied for the series starting from the highly symmetric trimer cluster and transformed to linear dimer geometry which progresses through the gradual reduction in the vertex NS. The optical activity such as the evolution of LSPR peak is discussed, the formation of hot spots is demonstrated and the strength of the local EF enhancement is calculated and correlated with the plasmon dipolar modes by using plasmon hybridization theory to understand the underlying physical concepts.