Abstract:

Since the discovery of the surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in mid-1970's,great efforts have been devoted to understand the enhancement mechanism as well as to extend the SERS system and application. There has been a consensus that the electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and chemical enhancement are the two important SERS mechanisms but each of them can only explain some of experimental results^[1,2] The EM mechanism relies on the surface plasmon resonance under a proper incident laser excitation. Strong EM enhancement has been observed on metals such as Cu, Ag and Au but not on transition metals such as Pt. However, the surface electronic properties can be modulated through submonolayer quantity modification of foreign metal atoms, hi this paper, we report a comparative study on SERS of Au and Pt in the presence of underpotentially deposited (UPD) submonolayer Sn.