TIP ENHANCED RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY PERFORMANCE

The outstanding performance of Next-Tip TERS probes is related to their morphological features.

The design of these probes have been developed to have the best AFM performance and the highest Raman signal.

apex gold nanoparticles enhance the local surface plasmon resonance LSPR effect

Enhancement factor and contrast

The enhancement factor (EF) value is a parameter that quantifies the enhancement of the Raman signal by the enhanced electric field at the tip apex. It is based in the contrast value. The contrast value is calculated using the experimental data collected from the near-field scan and the far-field scan at the same point. Gold TERS probes guarantee a contrast higher than 20 and silver TERS probes higher than 40. These values lead to an enhancement factor up to 105-106 with Next-Tip TERS probes.

Lifetime

Silver TERS tips are protected with a second layer of gold nanoparticles to avoid oxidation and contamination, preserving the effect of plasmon. This dense gold nanoparticle coating guarantees a thicker layer of metal that significantly improves the durability of this type of probes. In addition, the irregularities formed by the nanoparticles along the tip surface extend its lifetime during the measurements (when it is heated, and hence smoothed by the Raman laser).

apex gold nanoparticles coating metal Tip enhanced Raman Spectroscopy TERS
coating of nanoparticles forms branch-shape effective plamonic antena

Performance

The great control over the coating process allows high resolution on robust probes with a high degree of reproducibility. Furthermore, this coating process enables the placement of one or two nanoparticles in the apex of the tip, achieving very high lateral resolution. Measurements show AFM resolution less than 5nm and TERS resolution less than 10nm.

Users’ Reviews

Next-tip probes helped us to perform some experiments of this article:
Activation of Raman modes in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides through strong interaction with gold. Rodriguez A. et al. PHYSICAL REVIEW B 105, 195413 (2022)

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.195413

In terms of practical handling of the probes I was happy. Given the nature of the samples I used it was difficult for me to assess the spatial resolution in topography. I did not have problems with any of the probes I used.

Filipe Richheimer, from National Physical Laboratory (U.K.)

EASY-TERS probes are easier to focusing, more stable and better suited for reproducible TERS imaging. In stead of HRES-TERS probes have impressive plasmonic activity.

Witec

EASY-TERS tip was quite positive. The sSNOM response was fantastic (according to my postdoc) - the TERS was almost as good as one of our tips. The sSNOM (with 532 nm excitation) was really nice. I was surprised by the good response

Volker Deckert from Jena University (Germany)

TIP ENHANCED RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY PRODUCTS

Based on the innovative tip morphology patented by the company and on the different use cases reported by our customers, Next-Tip has developed two different types of TERS probes, depending on the density of nanoparticles coating.

Which one do you want to know?

EASY TERS PROBES Dense, irregular, granular and robust coating of nanoparticles

EASY TERS Probes

high resolution probe TERS Next-tip nanoparticles coating

High Resolution TERS Probes