A highly sensitive gold-coated photonic crystal fiber biosensor based on surface plasmon resonance

In this paper, we numerically demonstrate a two-layer circular lattice photonic crystal fiber (PCF) biosensor based on the principle of surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The finite element method (FEM) with circular perfectly matched layer (PML) boundary condition is applied to evaluate the performance of the proposed sensor. A thin gold layer is deposited outside the PCF structure, which acts as the plasmonic material for this design. The sensing layer (analyte) is implemented in the outermost layer, which permits easy and more practical fabrication process compared to analyte is put inside the air holes. It is demonstrated that, at gold layer thickness of 40 nm, the proposed sensor shows maximum sensitivity of 2200 nm/RIU using the wavelength interrogation method in the sensing range between 1.33-1.36. Besides, using an amplitude interrogation method, a maximum sensitivity of 266 RIU^-1 and a maximum sensor resolution of 3.75 × 10^-5 RIU are obtained. We also discuss how phase matching points are varied with different fiber parameters. Owing to high sensitivity and simple design, the proposed sensor may find important applications in biochemical and biological analyte detection.