A new paper has been published by our team in the journal Chemosensors. The article, entitled “Lighting Up the Heritage Sciences: The Past and Future of Laser-Induced Fluorescence Spectroscopy in the Field of Cultural Goods” belongs to the Special Issue Optical Chemical Sensors and Spectroscopy for Chemical Trace Element Detection and can be found at the following link: https://doi.org/10.3390/chemosensors11020100
Abstract
With the rapid scientific and technological changes that occur every day, a new kind of necessity, real-time, rapid, and accurate detection methods, preferably also non- or minimally invasive and non-destructive, has emerged. One such method is laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy (LIF), applied in various fields of activity in recent decades, ranging from industry and biochemistry to medicine and even heritage sciences. Fluorescence-based spectroscopic methods have all of the above-mentioned characteristics, and their functionality has been proven in many studies. Yet, they have not known great success as other molecular techniques. This paper is a short synthesis of the role of the laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy technique in heritage sciences, the main applications in this field, along with its advantages and limitations. The article focuses on the most common types of lasers used, the merging of two or more methods into hybrid techniques, the enhancement of the analytical capabilities of LIF and post-processing methods, and also explores some future development possibilities of LIF.