Near-unity Raman β-factor of surface-enhanced Raman scattering in a waveguide

The Raman scattering of light by molecular vibrations is a powerful technique to fingerprint molecules through their internal bonds and symmetries. Since Raman scattering is weak¹, methods to enhance, direct and harness it are highly desirable, and this has been achieved using optical cavities², waveguides^3–6 and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)^7–9. Although SERS offers dramatic enhancements^2,6,10,11 by localizing light within vanishingly small hot-spots in metallic nanostructures, these tiny interaction volumes are only sensitive to a few molecules, yielding weak signals¹². Here we show that SERS from 4-aminothiophenol molecules bonded to a plasmonic gap waveguide is directed into a single mode with >99% efficiency. Although sacrificing a confinement dimension, we find a SERS enhancement of ~10³ times across a broad spectral range enabled by the waveguide’s larger sensing volume and non-resonant waveguide mode. Remarkably, this waveguide SERS is bright enough to image Raman transport across the waveguides, highlighting the role of nanofocusing^13–15 and the Purcell effect¹⁶. By analogy to the β-factor from laser physics^10,17–20, the near-unity Raman β-factor we observe exposes the SERS technique to alternative routes for controlling Raman scattering. The ability of waveguide SERS to direct Raman scattering is relevant to Raman sensors based on integrated photonics^7–9 with applications in gas sensing and biosensing.