Urrutia Azcona, AitorGoicoechea Fernández, JavierArregui San Martín, Francisco Javier2016-04-062016-04-0620151687-725X (Print)1687-7268 (Electronic)10.1155/2015/805053https://academica-e.unavarra.es/handle/2454/20383The use of nanoparticles (NPs) in scientific applications has attracted the attention of many researchers in the last few years. The use of NPs can help researchers to tune the physical characteristics of the sensing coating (thickness, roughness, specific area, refractive index, etc.) leading to enhanced sensors with response time or sensitivity better than traditional sensing coatings. Additionally, NPs also offer other special properties that depend on their nanometric size, and this is also a source of new sensing applications. This review focuses on the current status of research in the use of NPs within coatings in optical fiber sensing. Most used sensing principles in fiber optics are briefly described and classified into several groups: absorbance-based sensors, interferometric sensors, fluorescence-based sensors, fiber grating sensors, and resonance-based sensors, among others. For each sensor group, specific examples of the utilization of NP-embedded coatings in their sensing structure are reported.application/pdfeng© 2015 Aitor Urrutia et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Optical fiber sensorsNanoparticlesNanostructured coatingsEvanescent sensorsFiber gratingsFluorescencePlasmon resonancesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess