Improving the performance of hollow fiber surface plasssmon resonance sensor with one dimensional photonic crystal structure.

A high performance hollow fiber (HF) surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor utilizing one-dimensional photonic crystal (1DPC) is proposed. The performance of the designed sensor is analyzed theoretically with respect to the center wavelength and the bilayer period. Because the light transmitted in the sensor mostly have large incident angles, the center wavelength of the 1DPC should shift to longer wavelength to ensure the band gap covers the spectrum range of the incident light. The sensor exhibits better performance when the detection spectral range is located in the band gap of 1DPC for incident angle larger than 80°. Compared to conventional HF SPR sensor, the figure of merit (FOM) of the proposed sensor is three to four times higher while the sensitivity is comparable. Moreover, within the limited spectrum range of 400 to 800nm, the proposed sensor have much wider refractive index (RI) detection range and can detect sensed medium with low RI very close to the supporting tube.