Refractive Index-based Ethanol Sensor using Hollow Core Photonic Crystal Fiber in THz region

In this paper, a refractive index-based ethanol sensor is proposed. The hollow core Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) with hybrid cladding structure is used. Ethanol is taken as the chemical analytes for sensing at terahertz frequency. TOPAS is used as a fiber material in photonic crystal fiber with asymmetrical rectangular hollow core. The outer layer of the PCF is considered as Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) for boundary conditions. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is used for mathematical analysis with COMSOL Multiphysics software. As results, the investigated parameters are sensitivity, confinement loss and effective area. The proposed PCF-based refractive index sensor shows the high relative sensitivity of 97.28%, low confinement loss (CL) of 6.27×10-13(dB/m) and high effective area of 14.4µm2 at terahertz frequency (0.8–1.6 THz). So, the proposed refractive index-based sensor can be used for various applications like marine industries, healthcare and food industry.