Abstract
Design of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) based biosensing platforms for cancer detection require careful optimization of nanostructure size and interparticle gap to facilitate resonance of localised plasmons and thus maximize enhancement factor. In this thesis, we discussed a simple modeling strategy of nanoparticle-based SERS biosensing platform, which can even be extended to other complex nanostructures as per design requirement. A comprehensive simulation study has been conducted to understand the effects of polarization dependence on the enhancement factor of the system. A new phenomenon of local hotspot switching is observed in multiple nanosphere systems which hasn’t been reported in literatures yet. Finally, validation experiments were performed on a simple self-assembled gold nanoparticle substrate with methylene blue as Raman probe molecule.
Supervisors: Sushanta Mitra, Manoj Sachdev