Liquid Crystal Photonic Crystal Fiber Sensors

Summary

Recently, photonic crystal fiber (PCF) has been shown to present an attractive platform for sensing applications due to its high mode confinement and flexible design. This chapter proposes and analyzes a novel design of silica PCF surface plasmon resonance (SPR) temperature sensor with liquid crystal (LC) as the temperature‐dependent material using full‐vectorial finite‐element method (FVFEM) with perfect matched layer boundary conditions. The chapter investigates the effects of the structure geometrical parameters, LC rotation angle, and temperature for structure optimization. The numerical results show that the suggested design has an average sensitivity of 0.77 nm/°C. Additionally, the chapter presents and analyzes another temperature sensor based on plasmonic LC‐PCF (PLC‐PCF). The suggested PLC‐PCF can be used as a temperature sensor with tunable sensitivity of about 1 nm/°C. Further, the numerical results reveal that the reported PLC‐PCF can be utilized as an ultrahigh tunable polarization filter.