Confinement of enhanced field investigated by tip-sample gap regulation in tapping-mode tip-enhanced Raman microscopy

The authors developed a tip-enhanced near field Raman microscope that can precisely regulate longitudinal distance between a metallic tip and sample molecules. This was done by employing a time-gated photoncounting scheme that enabled us to observe exponentially decaying near field Raman intensity with the tip-sample distance. The exponential decay shows a characteristic of the enhanced field generated by the localization of the surface plasmon polaritons near the tip apex. This microscope was applied to evaluate metal-coated tips and also to investigate confinement of the field generated at a gap between two metal nanostructures from the decay curves.