Gas concentration and refractive index sensor based on plasmonic induced absorption in metal-insulator-metal waveguide coupled with arc resonators structure

Abstract

In this paper, the plasmonic induced absorption (PIA) effect is numerically studied in a plasmonic metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide coupled with disk and arc-shaped resonators. The PIA spectrum characteristics and magnetic field distributions are investigated by the Finite difference-time domain method (FDTD) method, the PIA effect originated from the coupling of two resonance modes excited by the disk resonator and the arc-shaped resonator. The coupling mode theory (CMT) is used to fit the PIA transmission spectrum, and the calculated result fits well with the simulated spectrum. A double PIA spectrum can be observed by introducing another arc-shaped resonator both on the same or the opposite side. Three different structures are designed to achieve the PIA effect, and we found the PIA response can be easily tuned by altering the structure’s parameters. Three structures are designed and compared, the PIA spectra exhibit high refractive index (RI) sensing with maximum sensitivity of 867.2nmRIU−1. Besides, the proposed structure can also be used as a gas concentration (GC) sensor when the polyhexamethylene biguanide (PHMB) is introduced, a maximum sensitivity of 142.1 pm/ppm is achieved for the proposed structure II, the maximum figure of merit (FOM) and Q value are 57.8 and 65.9, respectively. Therefore, the results represented in this paper will be beneficial in the fields of high-performance refractive index and gas sensors.