ELECTROSPUN NANOFIBERS FOR PHOTONIC AND OPTICAL SENSING APPLICATIONS

Electrospinning (ES) is a technologically mature approach for the fabrication and production of polymeric, inorganic and composite nanofibers. This technology allows macroscopic quantities of nanomaterials to be produced, finding application in diverse fields including filtration, tissue engineering and electronics. The ES technique is attracting also a growing interest for the industrial upscaling potentialities of the process [1]. Recently, ES has been also utilized for the fabrication of optically active nanofibers, suitable for photonic and optoelectronic applications [2], where electrospun fibers can be used as light sources, waveguides, sensors and light detectors. Optically active nanofibers can be realized by using both transparent polymers, doped with low-molar-mass active molecules or inorganic quantum dots and semiconducting polymers (Figure 1). Most of the reported electrospun nanofibers made by luminescent or active compounds show improved optical properties, polarization properties, waveguiding and lasing properties [2], compared to the bulk counterpart. For photonic applications, the requirements for the fiber production are often tight, since the propagation of light in a fiber with submicron size (often wavelength scale size) can be adversely affected by a non uniform shape and/or composition of the fiber. This is particularly important for the exploitation of the optically active fibers as optical sensors [3], where th