Numerical Study of Circularly Slotted Highly Sensitive Plasmonic Biosensor: A Novel Approach

•To illustrate numerically a High Sensitivity circular slotted lattice (CSL).•To investigate Sensing characteristics with the modal analysis based finite element method (FEM) incorporating COMSOL multiphysics software. A highly sensitive Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) based Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensor is demonstrated in this paper in the optimized form of circular slotted lattice (CSL) structure. This proposed model performance is numerically scrutinized by using Finite Element Method (FEM) in presence of Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) and Scattering Boundary Condition. Plasmonic material ‘Gold’ which is chemically inert is used in this structure at the outer surface of the slotted area to mitigate fabrication challenge. This model indicates the highest wavelength sensitivity of 16000 nm/RIU using wavelength interrogation, the amplitude sensitivity of 780 RIU−1 by using amplitude interrogation method and the average spectral sensitivity of 6666 nm/RIU, respectively. Besides, this sensor has the potentiality of detecting analytes within Refractive Index (RI) range 1.4 to 1.46 with maximum wavelength resolution of 6.25 × 10−6 RIU and amplitude resolution of 1.28 × 10−6 RIU, respectively and the maximum figure of merits of 400 RIU−1. Moreover, the variation of structural parameters (such as pitch, plasmon layer thickness etc.) and the impact of these changes are also discussed in details. According to the high sensitivity performance, polynomial fit and high Figure of Merit (FOM), this amend structure can be a strong competitor in the field of biosensing.