Performance study of a highly sensitive plasmonic sensor based on microstructure photonics using an outside detecting method

Abstract

In this article, we design a microstructure based photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with external sensing surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. The performance of the design is numerically evaluated incorporating the finite element method (FEM) with Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) boundary condition of scattering case. Modal analysis is performed using finer mesh analysis. At the optimized thickness (40nm) of chemically stable gold (Au) layer, the ever been maximum reported wavelength sensitivity (WS) and standard amplitude sensitivity (AS) are to 75,000 nm/RIU with wavelength resolution (WR) 1.33×10−6 RIU and 480 per RIU correspondingly. With a large detection range of 1.33 to 1.41 RIU, the sensor also exposed high polynomial fit (R2=0.99) as well as a high figure of merit (FOM) of 300 per RIU. Since very much high sensitivity, high detecting range and FOM, lower the cost of fabrication, the proposed design can be a pleasant competitor in detection of the analyte refractive index (RI). At the last, we can say that the proposed sensor would become a great candidate to detect biological and biochemical samples with fast and smart responses.