Highly sensitive octagonal photonic crystal fiber based sensor

In this study, a number of propagation characteristics of hexagonal and octagonal photonic crystal fiber (H-PCF and O-PCF) structures, where both core and cladding are microstructured have been investigated by employing the full vectorial finite element method (FEM). The confinement loss, the effective refractive index and the relative sensitivity coefficient behaviors of the O-PCF and the standard H-PCF are numerically investigated and compared. It is found that under the same design parameters O-PCF structure has significantly lower losses and higher relative sensitivity coefficient compared with H-PCF structure.