The survey focuses on the most significant contributions in the field of fiber optic plasmonic sensors (FOPS) in recent years. FOPSs are plasmonic sensor-based fiber optic probes that use an optical field to measure the biological agents. Owing to their high sensitivity, high resolution, and low cost, FOPS turn out to be potential alternatives to conventional biological fiber optic sensors. FOPS use optical transduction mechanisms to enhance sensitivity and resolution. The optical transduction mechanisms of FOPS with different geometrical structures and the photonic properties of the geometries are discussed in detail. The studies of optical properties with a combination of suitable materials for testing the biosamples allow for diagnosing diseases in the medical field.

We propose a sixfold photonic quasi-crystal fiber with a trapezoidal analyte channel based on surface plasmon resonance for the detection of high-refractive-index (RI) liquid analytes and numerically analyze its sensing performance for different liquid analyte refractive indices and heights using the finite-element method. In contrast to the common D-shaped structure photonic crystal fiber, we design a trapezoidal analyte channel to investigate the role of the sample liquid height within the channel and discussed the feasibility of the fabrication process. We find that with various liquid analyte heights ratios of 20%, 25%, 30%, and 50% of the maximum channel height, the proposed biosensor exhibits linear sensing performance with a maximum RI sensitivity of 4400, 6100, 8000, and 17000 nm/RIU, respectively, for analytes RI range of 1.44–1.57, 1.41–1.51, 1.40–1.49, and 1.40–1.44. This sensor is suitable to detect various high RI chemicals, biochemicals, and organic chemical samples. Owing to its simple structure of the proposed biosensor with promising linear sensing performance, we envisage that this biosensor could turn out to be a versatile and competitive instrument for the detection of high-RI liquid analytes.

In this paper, for sensing and monitoring the biochemical analyte dissolved in liquid, antigen-antibody interaction or protein-DNA/RNA binding process, we design a surface plasmon resonance refractive index based biosensor by using a dual core D-shaped six-fold photonic crystal fibre which is embedded with silver nanowires for multi-detection. We numerically analyze both the dispersion relations and the loss spectra for various analytes by finite element method. This optical fibre bio-sensor monitors the changes of the refractive index for different analytes by measuring the spectral shifts of the fibre loss peaks at their resonance wavelengths. With the wavelength interrogation method, we find that the proposed biosensor with two sensing channels exhibits a maximum refractive index sensitivity of 3400 nm/RIU and a resolution of 2.94×10-5 RIU for a large sensing range from 1.35 to 1.50, which covers most known analytes of proteins, viruses or DNA/RNA. By utilizing 200 nm silver nanowires in the sensing channels, the sensitivity can be enhanced up to 4000 nm/RIU. Due to its special two-channel design for multi-sensing, it is possible to distinguish/study the binding possibility/capability of unknown analyte with two different target proteins simultaneously. Further, by introducing another critical channel, the confinement loss for either channel I or channel II can be greatly enhanced for high accurate result and more reliable sensing. Moreover, we numerically prove that the diameter of nano silver wires has great influences on the sensing peaks and sensitivity of the proposed biosensor.

In this paper, we mainly investigate the sensing performance of a fabricable 6-fold D-shaped photonic crystal fibre sensor based on the surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Its resonance couplings between fundamental core mode and three surface plasmonic modes which have different electric filed distributions for analytes of various refractive indices have been studied in detail. We firstly observe two different types of SPRs, namely‘, dielectric like’ resonance with low-loss peak and ‘plasmon like’ resonance with high-loss peak, by analysing the electric field distribution of the fibre modes. Then, we discuss the influence of the secondary SPR over the main SPR which is directly related to the limitation on the detection sensing range of the proposed sensor. In order to mitigate the adverse effect of the sub-peak of the secondary SPR on the sensor’s sensing performance, we reduce the thickness of analyte’s binding layer from 1500 nm to 500 nm. Thus, the sensing range of the proposed sensor can be tuned from 1.33-1.41 to 1.33-1.45 at the cost of a reduced maximum sensitivity from 7900 nm/RIU to 5300 nm/RIU. Owning to the simple structure design of the proposed sensor, we envisage that this highly sensitive D-shaped PCF-SPR sensor could be developed as a versatile and competitive instrument with a large and flexible refractive index detection range.

We report a statistical approach to model the resonant peak wavelength (RPW) equation(s) of a photonic crystal fibre (PCF)-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors in terms of the PCF structural parameters (air-hole diameter, pitch, core diameter and gold layer thickness) at various tolerance levels. Design of experiments (statistical tool) is used to investigate the role played by the PCF structural parameters for sensing performance evaluation—RPW, across three tolerance levels ($\pm 2$%, $\pm 5$% and $\pm 10$%). Pitch of the hollow-core PCF was discovered to be the major influencing parameter for the sensing performance (RPW) of the PCF-based SPR sensor while the inner metal (gold) layer thickness and core diameter are the least contributing parameters. This novel statistical method to derive the sensing performance parameter(s) of the PCF-based SPR sensors can be applied effectively and efficiently in the designing, characterisation, tolerance analysis not only at the research level, but also in optical fibre sensor fabrication industry to improve efficiency and lower cost.