Improving the sensitivity of a plasmonic photonic crystal fiber temperature sensor by introducing an array of nanoscale gold rods

An ultrasensitive temperature sensor based on photonic crystal fiber (PCF) filled with liquid crystal and nanogold rods using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is numerically analyzed in this paper. Gold is selected as a plasmonic metal to excite the SPR phenomenon. This paper shows a comparative study and inspects the effect of temperature sensing performance between one big gold rod and lattice of nanoscale gold rods. A finite element method (FEM) using COMSOL software has been applied for the investigation of some propagation characteristics of the PCF sensor. From the numerical results, it is observed that introducing an array of nanoscale gold rods helps to obtain high temperature sensitivity. After watchful investigation, the maximum sensitivities of 23 nm/°C have been achieved as the temperature changes from 30 °C to 40 °C. Compared with some previously reported temperature sensors, our proposed temperature sensor shows excellent sensitivity performances.