The observation of the localized surface plasmons and its coupling.

The surface plasmons properties on gold film composed of inverted square pyramidal pits were investigated. The near-field scanning optical microscopy image showed that the surface plasmons were mainly located in the cavity of the pits; this is consistent with the mapping image obtained using the Raman scattering intensity of Rhodamine 6G. The calculation results obtained by using the finite element method showed that the electric field mainly located in the pyramidal pits and the field distribution was not affected by the adjacent pits around it. Compared with the single pyramidal pit, the localized electric field intensity increased in the condition of the structure array because of the surface plasmons coupling effect. The surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra intensity decreased as the incident angle of the excited laser increased except that there are two peaks at around 5° and 17.5°, which can be attributed to the Bragg scattering of the surface plasmons. The reflectance spectra collected by a microscope at different magnifications were different. The intensity variation between surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra obtained using ×20 and ×50 objective illustrated that the adsorption peak in the reflectance spectra corresponded to the surface plasmons coupling effect. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]