Hollow core photonic crystal fiber for chemicals sensing in liquid analytes: Design and analysis

In this paper, a hollow core photonic crystal fiber (PCF)-based THz chemicals sensor has been presented. Hexagonal shaped hollow core and symmetrical hexagonal air lattices have been used in the cladding section to construct the PCF geometry. The developed PCF-based chemical sensor yields high performance in ethanol, methanol, water and benzene detection in targeted liquid samples in the THz regime, which is nearly 99% at 3 THz. Additionally, it reveals very negligible losses in both polarization modes. In addition, it renders significant improvement in different sensing properties like effective area, effective refractive index, numerical aperture (NA), nonlinear coefficient, spot size and beam divergences because of strategic geometrical arrangements. The performance of the proposed PCF sensor is numerically investigated and designed by COMSOL software v.5.3a. Fabrication feasibility of developed geometry is also stated here.