Over the past three decades, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has gone through a tortuous pathway to develop into a powerful surface diagnostic technique for in situ investigation of surface adsorption and reactions on electrodes. This review presents the recent progress achieved mainly in our laboratory on the improvement of detection sensitivities as well as spectral, temporal, and spatial resolutions. Various surface roughening procedures for electrodes of different metals coupled with maximum use of a high-sensitivity confocal Raman microscope enable us to obtain good-quality SER spectra on the electrode surfaces made from net Pt, Ni, Co, Fe, Pd, Rh, Ru, and their alloys that were traditionally considered to be non-SERS active. A novel technique called potential-averaged SERS (PASERS) has been developed for the quantitative study of electrochemical sorption. Applications are exemplified on extensively studied areas such as coadsorption, electrocatalysis, corrosion, and fuel cells, and several advantages of in situ electrochemical SERS are demonstrated. Finally, further developments in this field are briefly discussed with emphasis on the emerging methodology.

Raman and infrared (IR) spectroscopies have been used extensively to study the adsorption of pyridine on various surfaces for more than 40 years. However, no satisfactory assignment on all the vibrational modes has been achieved. In the present study, density functional theory at the level of B3LYP/6-311+G** (for C, N, H)/LANL2DZ (for metals) has been used for the normal coordinate calculations of the neutral and cationic species of the pyridine-metal atom (ion) complexes. Based on the present calculations, new assignments of the fundamental frequencies for the bands attributed to V17a, V3, V5, and V18b modes of the free pyridine in the reported IR and Raman spectra have been suggested. The calculated frequency shifts indicate that the coupling among V1, V12, and V18a modes and the coupling between these modes and the N-metal (Cu, Ag, Au, or Pt) bond depend on the strength of the N-metal bond and its bonding properties. The fundamental frequency of the V6a mode has a nearly linear relationship with the change of the force constant of the N-M bond. Therefore, its frequency shift can be used to directly correlate to the strength of the interaction of pyridine with the metal atom (surface).

In the mid-1970s, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) was discovered which impacted on surface science and spectroscopy because of its extremely high surface sensitivity. However, SERS had not developed as many people had hoped to be a powerful surface diagnostic technique that can be widely used because of some obstacles. For example, only three noble metals Au, Ag, and Cu could provide large enhancement, severely limiting the widespread applications involving other metallic materials of both fundamental and practical importance. In this article, emphasis is put on the recent work of our group to directly generate SERS on net transition metals (e.g., Pt, Ru, Rh, Pd, Fe, Co, Ni, and their alloys) by developing various roughening procedures and optimizing the performance of the confocal Raman microscope. An approach of replacing the randomly roughened surface with ordered nanorod arrays of transition metals is introduced as a promising class of highly SERS-active substrates. The surface enhancement factor for transition metals was calculated, which ranged from 1 to 4 orders of magnitude. The applications of SERS in surface adsorption, electro-catalysis, and corrosion of transition-metal-based systems demonstrated several advantages of in situ surface Raman spectroscopy. A preliminary theoretical approach, considering the electromagnetic and chemical contributions, is presented to explain the SERS behavior of transition metal electrodes and nanorod arrays. It has been shown that SERS together with other surface-enhanced optical phenomena could be one of important issues not only in surface science but also in nanoscale science. Prospects and further developments in this exciting field are discussed with emphasis on the emerging experimental methodology.