Innovative Design and Optimization of a Highly Sensitive PCF-Based Surface Plasmon Resonance Refractive Index Sensor for Enhanced Analyte Detection and Sensing Applications

This study presents a numerical simulation that analyses the functionality of plasmonic material sensor elements combined with a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) using the finite element method (FEM). A simple geometric framework is used to assemble the portions of silica and gold (Au) with a 50 nm gold thickness, in the sensor. Our suggested sensor component performs exceptionally well, differentiating it apart from earlier research on amplitude-sensitive (AS) and wavelength-sensitive (WS) evaluating methods. The range of the sensor component's refractive index (RI) is 1.35 to 1.39 RIU. Based on obtained numerical results, the greatest sensitivity for amplitude and spectral interrogation methods are stated to be -422 RIU<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−1</sup> and 10,000 nm/RIU, respectively. This approach offers an impressive resolution of 1x10–5 RIU for y-polarized measurements in terms of sensor resolution.