A large-mode-area polymer photonic crystal fiber made of polymethyl methacrylate with the cladding having only one layer of air holes near the edge of the fiber is designed and proposed to be used in surface plasmon resonance sensors. In such sensor, a nanoscale metal film and analyte can be deposited on the outer side of the fiber instead of coating or filling in the holes of the conventional PCF, which make the real time detection with high sensitivity easily to realize. Moreover, it is relatively stable to changes of the amount and the diameter of air holes, which is very beneficial for sensor fabrication and sensing applications. Numerical simulation results show that under the conditions of the similar spectral and intensity sensitivity of 8.3 × 10⁻⁵–9.4 × 10⁻⁵ RIU, the confinement loss can be increased dramatically.

A kind of surface plasmon resonance sensor based on grapefruit photonic crystal fiber (PCF) filled with different numbers of silver nanowires has been studied in this paper. The surface plasmon resonance modes and the sensing properties are investigated comprehensively using the finite element method (FEM). The simulation results show that the intensity sensitivity is related to nanowire numbers and the distance between two nanowires. The optimum value obtained is 2,400 nm/RIU, corresponding to a resolution of 4.51 × 10⁻⁵ RIU with a maximum distance of 2 μm. To a certain extent, the PCF filled with more nanowires is better than with just one. Furthermore, the air holes of grapefruit PCF are large enough to operate in practice. Moreover, the irregularity of the filled nanowires has no effect on sensitivity, which will be very convenient for the implementation of experiments.

In this paper, a reflective photonic crystal fiber (PCF) sensor probe for temperature measurement has been demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally. The performance of the device depends on the intensity modulation of the optical signal by liquid mixtures infiltrated into the air holes of commercial LMA-8 PCFs. The effective mode field area and the confinement loss of the probe are both proved highly temperature-dependent based on the finite element method (FEM). The experimental results show that the reflected power exhibits a linear response with a temperature sensitivity of about 1 dB/°C. The sensor probe presents a tunable temperature sensitive range due to the concentration of the mixture components. Further research illustrates that with appropriate mixtures of liquids, the probe could be developed as a cryogenic temperature sensor. The temperature sensitivity is about 0.75 dB/°C. Such a configuration is promising for a portable, low-power and all-in-fiber device for temperature or refractive index monitoring in chemical or biosensing applications.