The best of both worlds

摘要

This year marks 80 years since Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his investigations on the molecular scattering of light [1], work inspired during a trip to Europe by his first glimpse of the ‘wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea’ [2]. These studies led to the discovery of Raman scattering, now widely exploited for the unique spectral Raman ‘fingerprint’ associated with substances that facilitate their identification. However, one of the drawbacks of Raman spectroscopy has always been the low Raman scattering cross section, typically more than a 1000 times weaker than the Rayleigh scattering cross section, resulting in an extremely weak signal.