Rectangular-Shape Cladding-Based Photonic Crystal Fiber Surface Plasmon Resonance-Based Refractive Index Sensor

Abstract

In this paper, a surface plasmon resonance-based photonic crystal fiber refractive index sensor has been simulated. It has a hexagonal core surrounded by a rectangular cladding of different size air holes. To enhance the sensing performance of the proposed sensor, an adhesive layer of TiO2 has been deposited between the interface of the plasmonic metal layer of gold (Au) and dielectric material fused silica. With the most promising method to detect sensitivity which is the wavelength (λ) interrogation method with amplitude sensitivity method, we have found a wavelength sensitivity of 40,000 nm/RIU, an average wavelength of sensitivity of 14,285 nm/RIU, and an amplitude sensitivity of 328 RIU−1 for the range of refractive index 1.32–1.39. The resolution of our proposed sensor is 10−6 RIU. Fabrication of this sensor can easily be done with numerous available technologies such as the stack and draw method, sol–gel method, and others. This proposed external mechanism-based PCF sensor will lead us to a new era of future for sensing in the dairy industry field for detecting milk of animals, a biomedical field such as blood testing, cancer cell detection, the biochemical field such as detecting antigens, and antibodies, protein, enzymes, and alcohol sensing based on their refractive index RI. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.