Highly Sensitive Plasmonic Photonic Crystal Temperature Sensor Filled With Liquid Crystal

A novel highly sensitive surface plasmon resonance-based liquid crystal (LC) photonic crystal fiber (PCF) temperature sensor is presented and studied. Through this letter, the coupling characteristics between the core guided mode inside the PCF core infiltrated with nematic LC and surface plasmon mode on the surface of nano gold wire are studied in detail. The structural geometrical parameters of the proposed design, such as number of metal rods, core diameter, and metal rod diameter are optimized to achieve highly temperature sensitivity. The suggested sensor of compact device length of 20 μm proved to surpass the recent sensors with high sensitivity of 10 nm/°C. The results are calculated using a full-vectorial finite-element method with irregular meshing capabilities and perfectly matched layer boundary conditions.