In this paper, a surface plasmon resonance fiber sensor based on gold nano-column array instead of gold film is designed and optimized. The finite element method is used to optimize the diameter of the nano-gold column under the consideration of figure of merit, which relates to the sensitivity, resonance wavelength and resonance intensity. The optimized sensor has 70 nm gold nano-column coated on a side polished single mode fiber. The results show that the average sensitivity reaches 5318 nm/RIU when the environmental refractive index changing from 1.33 to 1.39 RIU, which is much higher than those in the conventional surface plasmon resonance structure. The optimizes design will serve a vital foundation to the fabrication of high performance fiber optic surface plasmon resonance sensors based on nano metallic structure.
Read full abstract