Photonics and Optolectronics research group is active in three main research lines. One focused on “Distributed optical fiber sensors”, one on “Optical bio-chemical sensors“, and another on “Nano-sensors”.

• Distributed optical fiber sensors line is focused on the development of distributed strain and temperature sensors for structural and environmental monitoring. Distributed acoustic sensors are developed as well for safety and security application.
• Optical bio-chemical sensors line deals with optical sensors to detect specific substances in several real solutions, exploiting plastic optical fiber intrinsic and extrinsic sensors, combined with different kinds of specific receptors, such as molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs), antibodies, aptamers, and chemical receptors.
• Nano-sensors line develops nano-plasmonic sensors with high sensitivity in a minimal sensible area, monitored exploiting innovative and low-cost experimental configurations. Moreover, about these optical nano-sensors, the proposed nanostructures can be realized by exploiting processes typical of microelectronic, so leading to economic advantages of a large-scale production; on the other side, also the quantity of receptor, that is obviously related to the sensible area, affects the total cost of the biochemical sensors.