Prevailing paradigms in novel lanthanide optical probes from molecular complexes to hybrid materials

Since lanthanide luminescent materials generally possess striking and special spectroscopic or photophysical features such as sharp emission bands and long lifetimes, they have emerged as new platforms in sensory and diagnostic fields. This review aims to summarize the recent development relevant to the assembly of ligand design and fluorogenic species for a wide range of analytes. Moreover, the flexible and rigid optical frameworks include not only the molecular-based functional complexes, numerous lanthanide hybrid nanocomposite materials that lie between the interface of organic and inorganic hosts also provide possibilities to fabricate tailor-made optical probes due to their unique chemical and physical properties. The remarkable examples of newly-designed lanthanide hybrid sensing materials (siloxane or titania based hybrids, carbon-related nanomaterials, polymeric composites and noble metal based probes) are discussed in this review.