Design of a nano-sensor for cancer cell detection based on a ternary photonic crystal with high sensitivity and low detection limit

Cancer is a fatal disease that leads to the death of many people all over the world. The detection of cancer disease is one of the most challenging in the medical field. A novel sensor based on a one-dimensional ternary photonic crystal is proposed for the detection of cancer cells. The proposed structure consists of a defect layer sandwiched between two identical periodic numbers. The defect layer can be either normal or cancerous cells. The proposed structure is air /(Si/Bi4Ge3O12/SiO2)(N)/Defect layer/(Si/Bi4Ge3O12/SiO2)(N)/air. The transmission spectra are investigated using the transfer matrix method. The effects of variation of the incident angle, the defect layer thickness, and the number of periods on the sensitivity and the photonic bandgap width are exhaustively investigated. An extremely high sensitivity of 3282.09 nm/RIU is obtained and a very low detection limit of 0.0001 RIU is achieved for the proposed detector. Moreover, the proposed sensor has low cost, easy to design with a nano-scale size. The aforementioned outcomes could open up an effective and applicable path for cancerous cells diagnosis.