Highly sensitive V-shaped SPR PCF biosensor for cancer detection

Abstract In this paper, a novel design of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) biosensor based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is introduced and analyzed for cancer cell detection. The full vectorial finite element method (FVFEM) is used throughout the numerical analysis of the suggested biosensor. The reported PCF has a V-shaped surface that is coated with ZrN as a plasmonic material. A coupling occurs between the core guided mode and surface plasmon mode SPM which depends on the studied analyte. Such a coupling is improved by using the suggested V-shape geometry which increases the sensor sensitivity.The geometrical parameters are optimized to achieve high sensor sensitivity. The proposed biosensor has high optical sensitivity of 6214.28, 3800, and 5008.33 nm/RIU, for quasi-transverse magnetic (TM), and 6000 nm/RIU, 4400 nm/RIU, and 5333.3 nm/RIU, for quasi-transverse magnetic (TE), for breast, basal, and cervical cancer cells, respectively. The reported optical sensor can pave the way for efficient and simple technique for cancer detection with low cost and high sensitivity instead of surgical and chemical techniques.