Highly sensitive twin core photonic crystal fiber for hazardous cancer cell detection in THz frequency regime

This article proposes a twin-core photonic crystal fiber (TC-PCF) with a hexagonal lattice that is designed to identify different cancers at an early stage using the refractive index of cancerous and normal cells in the terahertz (THz) frequency regime. The central elliptical hole of the TC-PCF, which is comparatively smaller than the rest of the air holes, is used in the proposed method to infiltrate liquid samples of cancer and normal cells at 80% and 30–70%, respectively. Subsequently, the model undergoes simulation across the frequency range of 0.7–0.8 THz in order to assess its optical characteristics. The finite element method (FEM) is used to evaluate the birefringence, transmission curve and coupling length of the TC-PCF to identify cancerous and normal cells. The transmitted spectral shift demonstrates that the proposed design provides a high optimal sensitivity of 1,016,666.67 nm/RIU, 1,521,428.57 nm/RIU, 1,578,571.42 nm/RIU, 1,370,000 nm/RIU, 1,671,428.57 nm/RIU and 1,507,142.85 nm/RIU for Hela, Jurkat, PC12, Basal, MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cancerous cells, respectively. These sensitivities are the highest that have been reported thus far, to the best of our knowledge. Additionally, the impact of changing air holes diameter on the proposed model's sensitivity is examined. Thus, the proposed TC-PCF sensor may be used to identify various kinds of cancer using this low-cost and simple detection technique.