Optical Fiber Sensors for the Detection of Metal Ions in Water

An overview on metal ions detection in water exploiting polymer optical fiber (POF) sensors is presented. A simple and highly sensitive plasmonic sensor in POFs has been functionalized by different specific self-assembled monolayer (SAM) receptors to achieve the specific detection of several metal ions in water. In particular, the detection of uranyl, copper(II), and iron(III) ions is reported here. The developed optical fiber sensors have been demonstrated to be effective for determining these metal ions in water solutions in µM ranges, even lower in the case of uranyl ion (tens of nM)