Theoretical Considerations of Photonic Crystal Fiber with All Uniform-Sized Air Holes for Liquid Sensing

Abstract

A novel liquid-infiltrated photonic crystal fiber model applicable in liquid sensing for different test liquids—water, ethanol and benzene—has been proposed. One core hole and three air hole rings have been designed and a full vector finite element method has been used for numerical investigation to give the best results in terms of relative sensitivity, confinement loss, power fraction, dispersion, effective area, nonlinear coefficient, numerical aperture and V-Parameter. Specially, the assessed relative sensitivities of the proposed fiber with water, ethanol and benzene are 94.26%, 95.82% and 99.58%, respectively, and low confinement losses of 1.52 × 10−11 dB/m with water, 1.21 × 10−12 dB/m with ethanol and 6.01 × 10−16 dB/m with benzene, at 1.0 μm operating wave- length. This novel PCF design is considered simple and can be easily fabricated for practical use, and the assessed waveguide properties has determined the potential applicability in real liquid sensing applications.