Abstract
•A ternary defective photonic crystal (PC) is proposed as a detector for cancerous cells.•The defect layer is taken as the patient's blood sample.•The index variation between normal and cancerous cells leads to a considerable shift in the resonant mode position.•The PC parameters are optimized and a sensitivity of 3282.09 nm/RIU was obtained.•All the sensor performance parameters are calculated and discussed.
Cancer is a fatal disease that leads to the death of many people all over the world. The detection of cancer disease is one of the most challenging in the medical field. A novel sensor based on a one-dimensional ternary photonic crystal is proposed for the detection of cancer cells. The proposed structure consists of a defect layer sandwiched between two identical periodic numbers. The defect layer can be either normal or cancerous cells. The proposed structure is air /(Si/Bi4Ge3O12/SiO2)N /Defect layer/ (Si/Bi4Ge3O12/SiO2)N /air. The transmission spectra are investigated using the transfer matrix method. The effects of variation of the incident angle, the defect layer thickness, and the number of periods on the sensitivity and the photonic bandgap width are exhaustively investigated. An extremely high sensitivity of 3282.09 nm/RIU is obtained and a very low detection limit of 0.0001 RIU is achieved for the proposed detector. Moreover, the proposed sensor has low cost, easy to design with a nano-scale size. The aforementioned outcomes could open up an effective and applicable path for cancerous cells diagnosis.
[Display omitted]