Molecular optomechanics in Faraday Discussions

Over the last few months, we (me in collaboration with my former group in San Sebastian and Jeremy Baumberg’s group at Cambridge University) have been preparing a contribution for the SERS: Faraday Discussion – a conference organized by the Faraday Division. Its format is unique, as the invited speakers prepare manuscripts a few months in advance, share them among attendees who then have a few months to prepare for a lively and lengthy discussion at the conference.  Thus, it’s a perfect venue to hash out the nitty-gritty details of new formalisms or ideas.

We have prepared manuscript entitled Linking classical and molecular optomechanics descriptions of SERS in which, as the title suggests, we attempt to close the gap between the classical formalisms used by the SERS community, and molecular optomechanics introduced by the LQNO group from EPFL and the expanded by us. We compare the two optomechanical formalisms to each other and to experiments, and then show how they can be simplified to the classical framework. We also develop and present classical intuitions to the phenomena leading to non-linearities in Raman scattering, and discuss some (much earlier!) contributions where they’ve been partially predicted.