In Situ Monitoring of Palladium-Catalyzed Chemical Reactions by Nanogap-Enhanced Raman Scattering using Single Pd Cube Dimers

The central dilemma in label-free in situ surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for monitoring of heterogeneously catalyzed reactions is the need of plasmonically active nanostructures for signal enhancement. Here, we show that the assembly of catalytically active transition-metal nanoparticles into dimers boosts their intrinsically insufficient plasmonic activity at the monomer level by several orders of magnitude, thereby enabling the in situ SERS monitoring of various important heterogeneously catalyzed reactions at the single-dimer level. Specifically, we demonstrate that Pd nanocubes (NCs), which alone are not sufficiently plasmonically active as monomers, can act as a monometallic yet bifunctional platform with both catalytic and satisfactory plasmonic activity via controlled assembly into single dimers with an ∼1 nm gap. Computer simulations reveal that the highest enhancement factors (EFs) occur at the corners of the gap, which has important implications for the SERS-based detection of catalytic conversions: it is sufficient for molecules to come in contact with the “hot spot corners”, and it is not required that they diffuse deeply into the gap. For the widely employed Pd-catalyzed Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling reaction, we demonstrate that such Pd NC dimers can be employed for in situ kinetic SERS monitoring, using a whole series of aryl halides as educts. Our generic approach based on the controlled assembly into dimers can easily be extended to other transition-metal nanostructures.