Lower index liquid chemical detection by using photonic crystal fiber sensor

Abstract

In this paper a novel hollow core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) sensor is presented which provides extremely high sensitivity and low confinement loss for liquid and chemical sensing applications. We examined the efficiency of the proposed PCF structure for liquids with wide range of refractive indices i.e., 1.484–1.534. The numerical investigation of the PCF is executed by the finite element method (FEM).The structure is designed by considering circular airhole in the core instead of an elliptical airhole to decrease the fabrication complexity. The investigation is carried out for a wide wavelength range from 0.8 to1.8 µm. In the simulation results based on FEM, we observed that the constructed PCF offers a high sensitivity of 95.64%, 96.20%, and 98% while low confinement loss of 1.13 × 10-16 dB/m, 8.5 × 10-17 dB/m and 5.3 × 10-17 dB/m respectively for n = 1.484, n = 1.5 and n = 1.534 at 1.3 µm operating wavelength. Thus, the proposed PCF can be used widely for liquid chemical detection in biosensing and commercial applications.