Polarized Raman Spectroscopy for Determining Crystallographic Orientation of Low-Dimensional Materials

Raman spectroscopy is a fast and nondestructive characterization technique, which has been widely used for the characterization of the composition and structure information of various materials. The symmetry-dependent Raman tensor allows the detection of crystallographic orientation of materials by using polarization information. In this Perspective, we discuss polarized Raman spectroscopy as a powerful tool for determination of the crystallographic orientation of various materials. First, we introduce the basic principles of polarized Raman spectroscopy and the corresponding experimental setups; the determination of crystallographic orientation of two-dimensional (2D) materials with in-plane isotropy and in-plane anisotropy using linearly polarized Raman scattering are then discussed. Furthermore, we discuss that using circularly polarized Raman spectroscopy, the azimuthal angle of materials in three dimensions (3D) can be characterized. In the final section, we show that the orientation distribution of nanomaterial assemblies can be measured using polarized Raman spectroscopy by introducing the orientation distribution function.