A refractive index based cancer cells sensor in terahertz spectrum: design and analysis

Refractive Index sensing in terahertz regime in one of the most popular applications of Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs). In this study, we presented a novel Photonic crystal fiber-based sensor for detecting various types of cancer cells presence in human blood. The PCF-based sensor designed for biosensing applications detects cancer cells like Jurkat, HeLa, Basal, MDA-MB-231, PC-12 and MCF-7 which are responsible for blood cancer, cervical cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer type I, adrenal gland cancer and breast cancer type II respectively. The optical parameters for this sensor were investigated and analyzed at different parameters to obtain the best results using finite element method (FEM) based COMSOL Multiphysics software. The proposed sensor resulted in highly significant results with highest relative sensitivity of 99.33%, very low confinement loss of 4.76 × 10^–12 dB/m, 9.02 × 10^− 8 m² effective area, 7.80 × 10^− 9 W^-1m^-1 nonlinearity, etc. at 1.6 THz frequency optical signal. Changing the pitch size has an effect on overall optical properties. With these better results, the proposed sensor design can be utilized effectively in the medical industry for early diagnosis of cancer in the human body.