The vibrational and rotational degrees of freedom in a molecule add complexity that complicate optical cycling and state preparation procedures. However, the same additional degrees of freedom also make molecules suitable candidates for tests of physics beyond the standard model. A precision measurement of the transition energy between two vibrational...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful technique for characterizing molecular systems. It combines the chemical selectivity of vibrational spectroscopy with plasmonic signal enhancement to achieve the ultimate limit of detection--a single molecule. By overcoming the effects of ensemble averaging, single molecule SERS (SMSERS) probes distributions in molecular interactions and...