Designing a Highly Sensitive Gold-Coated Circular Photonic Crystal Fiber-based Surface Plasmon Resonance (C-PCF-SPR) Sensor

Abstract

Abstract Wavelength and amplitude sensitivity are two important parameters in the performance of photonic crystal fiber (PCF)-based sensors. In the present study, to achieve the highest amplitude and wavelength sensitivity, a circular photonic crystal fiber surface plasmon resonance (C-PCF-SPR) sensor consisting of three central air holes with external sensing capability and a gold film as an active plasmonic material has been introduced which could obtain the resonance wavelength in the infrared region (at 3,000–3,300 nm). To analyze propagation properties of the proposed structure finite difference eigenmode solver method in Lumerical software has been used. The maximum wavelength and amplitude sensitivity of the proposed structure in refractive index (RI) range of 1.34–1.38 is equal to 18,681 nm/RIU and 942.4699 RIU− 1, respectively. Moreover, the feasibility of the introduced sensor is considered to be very high because of its similar design to the original PCF. Therefore, the proposed highly sensitive C-PCF-SPR sensor is very efficient for detection in nanotechnology, biomedical and biochemical applications.