Air-silica core microstructured optical fiber-based SPR sensor for temperature and refractive index measurement

We propose an air-silica core microstructured optical fiber-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor to simultaneously measure temperature and refractive index (RI). The sensing channel is formed by coating the outside of the fiber with a gold film and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) layer as a temperature sensing medium, and then being immersed into the liquid analyte. The plasmon mode can penetrate through the PDMS layer and then into the analyte, therefore both the temperature and the analyte RI changings can lead to the variations of SPR spectra that will be measured. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed sensor can support two resonance peaks in the x-polarized core mode and one resonance peak in the y-polarized core mode, therefore providing two detection approaches, peak-based and polarization-based approaches. By measuring the two peaks in the x-polarized core mode, for the peak-based approach, the temperature coefficients are −2.077 nm/°C and −2.723 nm/°C, and the RI coefficients are 1252 nm/RIU and 1931 nm/RIU, respectively. While by measuring the second peak in x-polarized core mode and the peak in y-polarized core mode, for the polarization-based approach, the temperature coefficients are −2.723 nm/°C and −3.401 nm/°C, and the RI coefficients are 1931 nm/RIU and 2973 nm/RIU, respectively.