Improving the Sensitivity of Fiber Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor by Filling Liquid in a Hollow Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel hollow core photonic crystal fiber-based fiber SPR sensor filled with liquid to enhance sensitivity, achieving over 6,430 nm/refractive index unit, promising for chemical and biosensing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new fiber SPR sensor design using liquid-filled hollow core photonic crystal fiber to significantly improve sensitivity.

Findings

Sensitivity over 6,430 nm/refractive index unit predicted

Liquid mixture refractive index tuning enhances performance

Potential for ultrahigh sensitivity fiber biosensors

Abstract

Inspired by the classic theory, we suggest that the performance of a D-shaped fiber optical surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor can be improved by manipulating the fiber core mode. To demonstrate this, we propose a novel fiber SPR sensor based on a hollow core photonic crystal fiber with liquid mixture filled in the core. The fiber sensor design involves a side-polished fiber with gold film deposited on the polished plane and liquid filling. Numerical simulation results suggest that by tuning the refractive index of the liquid mixture, the predicted sensitivity will be over 6,430 nm/refractive index unit for an aqueous environment, which is competitive for fiber chemical sensing. This optimization method may lead to an ultrahigh sensitivityfiber optical biosensor.