Surface plasmon resonance sensor using photonic crystal fiber for sucrose detection

In this paper, a novel photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is numerically characterized by finite element method (FEM) based mode solver software for bio-analyte sensing, particularly for detecting natural sucrose having a refractive index (RI) ranging from 1.29 to 1.42. The proposed PCF consists of a solid silica core and adjacent rectangular air holes in the cladding. To introduce the widely known surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon into the proposed sensor, the entire outer surface is covered by a thin gold film. The sensing methodology is appropriately addressed, and each of the designed parameters of the sensor structure is tuned sufficiently to find out the desired sensing performance. Considering RI change at the outer surface, appealing sensing performance such as maximum wavelength sensitivity of 216,000 nm/RIU and maximum amplitude sensitivity of 1138.52 RIU-1 are attained. In addition, the proposed sensor possesses a resolution of 4.63×10-7 RIU, linearity of 0.9891, the figure of merit of 1981.651 RIU-1, and detection accuracy of 0.019802 nm-1. However, except for sucrose detection, the promising sensing characteristics of the proposed sensor indicate its potential to be effectively used to detect biochemical and organic samples. © 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Publishing Group Publishing Agreement.