Design and optimization of photonic crystal fiber for liquid sensing applications

Abstract This paper proposes a hexagonal photonic crystal fiber (H-PCF) structure with high relative sensitivity for liquid sensing; in which both core and cladding are microstructures. Numerical investigation is carried out by employing the full vectorial finite element method (FEM). The analysis has been done in four stages of the proposed structure. The investigation shows that the proposed structure achieves higher relative sensitivity by increasing the diameter of the innermost ring air holes in the cladding. Moreover, placing a single channel instead of using a group of tiny channels increases the relative sensitivity effectively. Investigating the effects of different parameters, the optimized structure shows significantly higher relative sensitivity with a low confinement loss.