A new photonic crystal fiber gas sensor based on evanescent wave in terahertz wave band: design and simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design of a new photonic crystal fiber (PCF) gas sensor for evanescent-field sensing in terahertz (THz) wave band. This sensor can be used to identify the gas, and its size is very large, so that it is beneficial to fill it with the test substance. Based on simulation, we demonstrate that the gas sensor using PCFs with four noncircular large holes in the cladding has high sensitivity and low loss, the confinement loss is less than 0.007 dB/m, and the bending loss is very small. The new PCF gas sensor can detect kinds of gases, for example, if test gas is water vapor, it has obvious absorption peaks in THz band, and the sensitivities of gas sensor are 64% and 73% at 1.097 THz and 0.752 THz, respectively. Due to the ultra-low loss and high sensitivity of the model, the novel steering-wheel structured fiber is very suitable for evanescent-field sensing and the detection of chemical and biological products.

Keywords

Photonic Crystal Fiber / Evanescent Wave / Effective Refractive Index / Confinement Loss / Power Percentage

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This work has been supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No.2010CB327801).