Plasmonic Biosensor With Gold and Titanium Dioxide Immobilized on Photonic Crystal Fiber for Blood Composition Detection

Abstract

This paper proposes a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based plasmonic biosensor for the detection of various blood compositions like red blood cells (RBCs), hemoglobin (HB), white blood cells (WBCs), plasma, and water. The finite element method (FEM) has been used to simulate and quantitatively evaluate this biosensor. The gold and titanium dioxide coated PCF operates on the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) theory, where the gold layer acts as a plasmonic material, and the titanium dioxide layer improves adhesion between the gold layer and the PCF surface. SPR occurs at the interface between gold and the sensing channel, when the core propagation mode is coupled with the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode in the vicinity of the phase-matching point. Due to the occurrence of SPR, the loss peak is noticed in the core propagation mode, and this loss peak is extremely sensitive to the various blood compositions that each have their unique refractive index (RI) poured into the sensing channel of the PCF. The proposed biosensor has maximum wavelength sensitivity of 12400 nm/RIU. However, the maximum amplitude sensitivity is −574.3 RIU <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−1</sup> . Furthermore, with the maximum detection limit of 0.02, the refractive index resolution varies from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8.06\times {10}^{-6} {\mathrm {RIU}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.0\times {10}^{-5} {\mathrm {RIU}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . As a result, it is safe to say that this biosensor will work admirably in terms of detecting blood compositions. Thus, the proposed biosensor will explore the broad realms of medical diagnostics.