High sensitivity and wide detection range temperature and refractive index photonic crystal fiber sensor

Abstract A D-shaped surface plasmon resonance temperature and refractive index (RI) sensor based on photonic crystal fiber is proposed. The fiber core is composed of five air holes arranged in a pentagonal shape, which effectively improves the sensitivity. The gold film is used as a plasmonic material, and the mixture of ethanol and chloroform is used as a temperature sensitive liquid. A finite element method with higher accuracy and stronger applicability is used to study the performance of the sensor. The results indicate that when filling the mixture, the temperature sensor can detect the temperature in the range of 0 °C–60 °C. A maximum temperature sensitivity of 11.0 nm °C −1 is obtained by filling the mixture. The RI sensor can detect RI in the range of 1.13–1.40, with the wavelength range of 1.2–2.4 μ m, and the maximum wavelength sensitivity reaches up to 21 000 nm RIU −1 . The sensor can be used in biomedicine, environmental monitoring, food detection, temperature detection and other related fields, and has certain competitiveness and commercial value.