Chapter 8 – Recent developments

Publisher Summary This chapter concentrates on important recent developments in the field of SERS. While none of the new developments requires a ground-breaking modification of the underlying principles established more than 20 years ago, they do represent milestones that set new directions and created new questions on both older and newer problems. They triggered a substantial amount of research activity and, to a large degree, invigorated the field in its quest for a deeper understanding of the basic principles themselves. The definition of important is subjective and open to debate. This chapter chooses topics that appeal to the present authors for a variety of reasons, but the list is not claimed to be exhaustive. By the same token, the definition of recent is also somewhat arbitrary. By recent important results it means the results that have appeared in the literature during (roughly) the last decade, and made considerable impact on SERS research and its potential applications. Each topic is presented in a separate self-contained section. One of the most interesting developments in SERS in the last decade is the realization and demonstration that a single molecule can be detected with SERS.