Highly sensitive nonlinear photonic crystal fiber based sensor for chemical sensing applications

This study has reported an extremely high sensitive and nonlinear chemical sensor based on photonic crystal fiber is presented with numerical investigation. In order to reduce fabrication complexity, the proposed chemical detector is designed with circular air holes. To calculate the guiding characteristics, finite element method based Comsol software is used. Different types of commonly used materials are used as background material of that proposed sensor to ensure maximum relative sensitivity to the chemicals. The simulation results confirms that, very high relative sensitivity of 97.89%, 96.31%, 91.87% and 88.93% for benzene, chloroform, ethanol and water respectively at 1.55 µm of optical signal. Moreover the proposed chemical sensor offers negligible confinement loss of around 10–10 dB/m for all sensing analytes. In addition, other important characteristics such as numerical aperture, nonlinearity are discussed in detail. The wavelength dependent light guiding characteristics for the solid materials and the sample under test is used in simulation to ensure better accuracy and to create real life environment.