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Environmental monitoring, as well as safety and security, oil and gas, and biomedical applications demand real-time and in-situ solutions together with unambiguous identification and quantification of the chemical analytes composing the investigated samples. Gas spectroscopy exploiting laser sources is a reliable tool providing highly selective and sensitive detection with robust and compact sensor architectures. Among most sensitive optical techniques, Quartz-Enhanced Photoacoustic Spectroscopy (QEPAS) has been demonstrated as the leading-edge technology for addressing these application requirements, also providing modularity, ruggedness, and portability. It exploits a quartz tuning fork (QTF) as a sharply resonant acoustic transducer to detect weak photoacoustic excitation and allowing the use of extremely small volumes [1]. QEPAS technique does not require an optical detector, it is wavelength independent, it is immune to environmental noise, and can operate in a wide range of temperature and pressure. These factors, together with and its proven reliability and ruggedness, represent the main distinct advantages with respect to other laser-based techniques for environmental monitoring and in situ detection.

Starting from the basic physical principles governing the QEPAS technique, I will review the main results achieved by exploiting custom QTFs for QEPAS sensing, with a main focus on real-world applications. Finally, a detailed description of an innovative QEPAS shoe-box sized sensor system will be provided [2].

Vincenzo Spagnolo obtained his PhD in physics in 1994 from the University of Bari. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as researcher of the National Institute of the Physics of Matter (INFM). Since 2004, he has worked at the Technical University of Bari, formerly as assistant and associate professor and, starting from 2018, as Full Professor of Applied Physics. In 2019, he became Vice-Rector of the Technical University of Bari, deputy to Technology Transfer. He is “Hundred Talent” visiting professor as Shanxi University in Taiyuan (China). He is the director of the joint-research lab PolySense, created by Technical University of Bari and Thorlabs, devoted to the development and implementation of novel gas sensing techniques and the realization of highly sensitive trace-gas sensors. His research activity is documented by more than 210 Scopus publications and three filed patents. He has given more than 50 invited/keynote presentations at international conferences and workshops. Prof. Spagnolo serves in EU-COST, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Austrian Science Fund, Dutch Research Council (NWO), and Italian minister of Research and Italian Minister of Defense as reviewer of photonics and sensing related projects. Prof. Spagnolo is program committee member of several SPIE and OSA conferences. He is editor of Sensors (MPDI), Applied Science (MPDI), and Journal of Sensors (Hindawi) and guest editor of Photoacoustics (Elsevier). Prof. Spagnolo is fellow member of SPIE and senior member of the OSA.