E-Beam lithography designed substrates for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy

Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is a popular method that amplifies weak Raman signals from Raman-active analyte molecules making use of certain specially-prepared metallic surfaces. The main challenge in SERS is to design and fabricate highly repeatable, predictable, and sensitive substrates. There are many fabrication methods that strive to achieve this goal, which are briefly summarized in this paper. The E-beam lithography method is proposed to be superior to the mentioned techniques. In this paper, we review how EBL can be utilized in the preparation of SERS substrates and we discuss the contributions to the field by the Özbay group.