Hyper-Raman scattering enhanced by anisotropic dimer plasmons on artificial nanostructures.

Silver nanodimers with a small gap of a few nanometers aligned on glass substrates were used to enhance hyper-Raman scattering of crystal violet dye molecules. When localized surface plasmon of the dimer array was resonantly excited along the interparticle axis, hyper-Raman intensity was significantly enhanced. Moreover, the spectral appearance was slightly different between the two excitation polarizations, suggesting a possibility of two resonance contributions at one-photon and two-photon energies. Since the plasmonic property of dimer arrays can be controlled by the dimer geometry, the dimer arrays are expected to be well-defined substrates for surface-enhanced hyper-Raman spectroscopy.