Absolute efficiency and dispersion of Raman scattering by phonons in silicon

We have measured the absolute Raman efficiency for first order scattering of the optical zone center phonon with two different incident photon energies (1.16 and 0.94 eV) by comparison with the Raman scattering from diamond. A value significantly lower than the experimental data published previously in this region has been found. For the first order scattering no dispersion of the scattering efficiency has been observed at the indirect gap, in contrast to the second order scattering which shows a pronounced resonance behaviour in this energy range.