Left–Handed Photonic Crystal Sensor, Analytical Approach

Abstract

Propagation of electromagnetic waves in left-handed photonic crystal media has received an increasing attention from researchers in the optoelectronics field. In the last two decades planar waveguides have been introduced in the literature in optical sensing as a novel non-communication application of slab waveguides such as humidity sensing, chemical sensing, biochemical sensing, and biosensing. Slab waveguide sensors have received an increasing interest due to their immunity to electromagnetic interference, have no danger of ignition, are field resistant, small sized, low price, safe when used in aggressive environments, and mechanically stable. In this thesis, a multilayer one dimensional photonic crystal slab waveguide with alternating left-handed material layers has been investigated for sensing applications. TE and TM polarization are presented and the dispersion relations of the proposed sensor are obtained. The sensitivity of the effective refractive index to variations in the refractive index of the cladding is obtained. The power flow through each layer is presented. The proposed photonic crystal sensor has higher values of the sensitivity than the sensitivity of the conventional sensors. It could lead to design future sensors with specified higher sensitivity. The numerical solution of the equations and the calculations were performed using MAPLE 13 software.