Surface plasmon resonance sensor based on hollow‐core PCFs filled with silver nanowires

Abstract

A surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor based on hollow-core photonic crystal fibre (HC-PCF) filled with silver nanowires is designed. The analyte and silver nanowires are full filled in the air holes of the HC-PCF to realise the SPR sensing, which is more convenient than silver coated in operation. The designed sensor is analysed through numerical simulations and demonstrated by experiments. All the results show that a blue-shift is obtained with increase of the analyte refractive index (RI), and the silver nanowires concentration has no effect on spectral sensitivity. The highest average spectral sensitivity of 14 240 nm/RIU is obtained by experiments, which is higher than that previously reported for the same type of sensors. The sensor is useful for detecting small analyte RI changes, and can also provide a reference for the implementation and application of PCF-SPR sensors with high sensitivity.

Photonic crystal fiber based plasmonic sensors

“…This limits the practical implementation of PCF SPR sensors. To eliminate the thin film coating, nanowire based PCF SPR sensors have been reported [56,[116][117][118]. A silver nanowire based PCF SPR sensor has been reported for the RI detection, where the nanowires and liquid were selectively filled 1 st ring of the PCF [116].…”

“…Blue shift occurred due to the increase in temperature with a sensitivity of 2.7 nm/°C. Hollow-core PCF has been experimentally developed for the RI detection, where the core is filled with liquid and silver nanowires ( Figure 3f) [118], resulting in wavelength sensitivity of 14,240 nm/RIU. Furthermore, hollow-core photonic band gap fiber (HC-PBGF) based SPR sensor was numerically investigated where the core was filled with liquid and silver nanowires ( Figure 3g) [119].…”

“…The application of established theoretical models to sensor implementation is limited because of fabrication challenges. Although some experimental devices reported in the literature, their applications are found in limited research domain [117,118]. Therefore, the empirical an alternative way to reduce the fabrication complexity [45,48,49,54,122,124].…”

“…Another main limitation of PCF SPR sensor implantation is the thin selective metal coating. Recently, there are few designs of PCF SPR sensors which have been fabricated for the purpose of temperature measurement and chemical sensing [117,118].…”

Light propagation in strip and slot waveguide arrays for sensing

“…1 . More recently, chip-scale photonic devices have also been used in such applications 2 , including localized surface plasma [3][4][5] , photonic crystals [6][7][8] , micro-cavities 9,10 , waveguides [11][12][13][14] , interferometers [15][16][17] , and nano-fibers [18][19][20][21] . The intrinsic mechanism of RI sensor is detecting the parameters which are determined by diffraction characteristics changing due to the varieties of cladding RI of sensors.…”