Spectroelectrochemical Sensing: Current Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Spectroelectrochemistry (SEC) has been used for more than 50 years, but this set of techniques has not been widely used for quantitative analysis. For many years, no commercial instruments were available, which made very difficult to spread the use of SEC. Nowadays, only the creativity of the researchers is required to exploit the capabilities of SEC. This review is written with the aim of showing the potential of SEC, mainly for analytical chemistry. Here, we explain what SEC is, how analytical responses can be obtained, why these techniques are useful for sensors, with a brief description of its advantages in use, and, finally, we try to show the challenges that must be addressed in the next years. SEC can resolve interesting analytical problems using the high amount of data provided by this intrinsic trilinear technique. Given the quantitative analysis point of view of this review, the discussion of the SEC techniques is focused on UV/Vis absorption, photoluminescence and Raman SEC.

Spectroelectrochemistry (SEC) has been used for more than 50 years, but this set of techniques has not been widely used for quantitative analysis. For many years, no commercial instruments were available, which made very difficult to spread the use of SEC. Nowadays, only the creativity of the researchers is required to exploit the capabilities of SEC. This review is written with the aim of showing the potential of SEC, mainly for analytical chemistry. Here, we explain what SEC is, how analytical responses can be obtained, why these techniques are useful for sensors, with a brief description of its advantages in use, and, finally, we try to show the challenges that must be addressed in the next years. SEC can resolve interesting analytical problems using the high amount of data provided by this intrinsic trilinear technique. Given the quantitative analysis point of view of this review, the discussion of the SEC techniques is focused on UV/Vis absorption, photoluminescence and Raman SEC.