Design of a terahertz chemical sensor using a dual steering-wheel microstructured photonic crystal fiber

Abstract In this paper, we design a novel photonic crystal fiber (PCF) chemical sensor in terahertz region wherein the cladding structure is made of a dual steering-wheel (DSW) shape of large non-circular air-hole. In this PCF, rectangular structured air holes are introduced in the core, which, in turn, is filled with any of the analytes, namely, water, ethanol and benzene. We use the full-vectorial finite element method (FEM) to optimize the structural parameters. The findings of the simulation show a high relative sensitivity of 94.9%, 95.4% and 95.6% for water, ethanol and benzene, respectively. Further, we study the various characteristics of the proposed PCF, namely, birefringence, effective area and numerical aperture (NA).