Luminescent chemosensors based on silica nanoparticles for the detection of ionic species

The field of nanoparticles is very complex and many-sided, and these versatile materials find applications in different areas going from industry, to bio-analysis, and catalysis. Within this wide framework we have focused our attention on luminescent silica nanoparticles able to act as sensing materials. We present here an overview on recent examples having ionic species as the target analyte. Our analysis tries to highlight the huge potentiality offered by these nanoarchitectures that can allow pairing and even improving many of the typical features of molecular probes in several applications.