Sensors are an integral part of any instrumentation, mechanical assembly, automobile engineering, heavy engineering, drug-delivery vehicles, national surveillance gadgets or any electromagnetic application unit, such as antennas and communication electronics. A need for smart, adaptive, miniaturized, extremely sensitive, selective and rapid sensor is always on anvil. Nanomaterials are offering promising options to improve the conventional sensors and to develop advanced sensors which would be adaptive, faster, selective and more precise. Nanotechnology has been dominating applied research frontiers for more than a decade now. The research has an emphasis on exploring novel materials with exotic properties, which are attributed to their nano-size-regimes. Typically explored examples are metals, oxides and chalcogenides, in their pure and composite forms.
Through this presentation a brief outline on the progress of science and technology, in the domain of sensors will be given. Frequency detections; low-field and frequency (electric and magnetic fields and ultra-low-frequency signals), high frequency (radio frequencies in Radar range) detections will be discussed. Biosensors being developed for disease diagnostics and smart drug delivery vehicles would be also elaborated in this presentation. Various approaches used in the investigators laboratory would be elaborated; namely, the optical fiber approach, metamaterial approach and conventional resistive approach. The relationships of the obtained properties would be associated with the physics and chemistry at nano-level and their energy dynamics for sensing a particular physical parameter.