Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering – SERS

Introduction

This meeting aims to set the agenda for the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) field for the next 10 years, by bringing the community together to welcome in new emerging priority areas and embracing the diversity of approaches and disciplines which are contributing to the growth and understanding of this optical phenomenon, especially in light of new theoretical and experimental data. It follows the highly successful Faraday Discussion on SERS in 2005, which mainly focused on the origin of the enhancement and the mechanisms behind this using the information available at that time.

Academic and industrial interest in SERS has grown over the past decade. This is evidenced by the number of papers published involving the term ‘surface enhanced Raman’ increasing from 580 in 2005 to almost 2000 in 2014. There are also now companies dedicated to providing SERS surfaces and SERS based products. The miniaturisation of Raman instrumentation has also opened up the deployment of SERS as a technique into a much wider sphere of disciplines than traditional chemistry and physics.

Format

The Faraday Division have been organising high impact Faraday Discussions in rapidly developing areas of physical chemistry and its interfaces with other scientific disciplines for over 100 years.

Faraday Discussions have a special format where research papers written by the speakers are distributed to all participants before the meeting, and most of the meeting is devoted to discussing the papers. Everyone contributes to the discussion – including presenting their own relevant research. The research papers and a record of the discussion are published in the journal Faraday Discussions.