Simulated Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy via scattering on a dense, randomly-oriented, array of nanostructures

This work proposes a set of stochastic experiments that aims to study the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) parameter space in silico. The experimental procedure is modeled as optical scattering on an array of randomly oriented nanoscale dielectric scatterers. A deterministic volume integral equation with a periodic kernel is developed and solved using the method of moments. A Monte Carlo method is also employed to sample solutions of this integral equation for randomly generated configurations of scatterers closely resembling actual SERS substrates. By utilizing these numerical methods, both far- and near-field observables are studied as a function of nanostructure density, alignment, and composition. Field distributions are also shown to represent the preliminary results.