Side-Opened Suspended Core Fiber-Based Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor

An integrated surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based on an Au-film-coated, side-opened suspended core fiber is proposed and simulated to develop a highly sensitive, real-time refractive index sensor. The inner surface of the side-opened hole is supposed to be uniformly deposited with a thin Au film for realizing the SPR operation. Such a sensor not only ensures a fast response time, but also brings up a designing flexibility for SPR biosensing applications. Two potential sensing mechanisms, i.e., monitoring the transmission loss spectrum peak shift and measuring the transmission power change at a fixed wavelength are utilized and analyzed to achieve a better sensitivity. Moreover, our calculation results show that this novel sensor could cover a wide index detection range with an optimized resolution of up to 2.3e-5 refractive index unit.