Hollow-core high-sensitive photonic crystal fiber for liquid-/gas-sensing applications

Abstract

A low confinement loss of hollow-core photonic crystal Fiber (HC-PCF) for liquid-/gas-sensing applications has been proposed. Various HC-PCF backgrounds such as silica, BK7 and Teflon glass with different core materials such as glycerol, benzene and toluene have been studied using a finite element method with perfectly matched layer-based COMSOL software. The performance of the proposed PCF is analyzed using different metrics such as confinement loss, effective area, numerical aperture, relative sensitivity and effective refractive index for different combinations to compare the effects of different backgrounds in HC-PCF. The proposed HC-PCF structure offers relative sensitivity of 91.96% and 1.74 × 10−14 dB/m of confinement loss using Teflon glass as the substrate for benzene. The proposed PCF can be used for liquid- and gas-sensing applications with its low confinement loss and high sensitivity. The proposed simple cladding structure is easy to fabricate and offers 26% improved relative sensitivity compared to existing PCFs in the literature. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature.