Abstract
Due to tremendous design flexibility and ease of light control capability, the photonic crystal fiber offers efficient, flexible, and miniaturized plasmonic biosensors with attractive features. In this work, a high index (GeO2 doped silica) core flat fiber is proposed and analyzed for RI sensing ranging from 1.53 to 1.60. A rectangular analyte channel is created on top of a flat fiber to better handle the liquid analyte. To introduce the plasmonic effect, TiO2 and gold arc deposited to the analyte channel. The sensing performance is carried out for two operating wavelengths, as two peaks are obtained for each analyte. The second operating wavelength shows better sensing performance than the first one. However, the proposed sensor offers average wavelength sensitivity of 5000 nm/RIU with a sensor resolution of 2 x 10(-05) RIU. In addition, the proposed sensor shows identical linearity, which is quite rare in prior sensors. Moreover, the proposed flat sensor provides outstanding detection accuracy of 0.01 nm(-1), detection limit of 79.28 nm, signal to noise ratio of -4.1497 dB, and figure of merit of 50 RIU-1. Owing to outstanding sensing performance and a unique detection range, this sensor can be effectively used in biological and organic analyte sensing applications. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group