A new structure of photonic crystal fiber with high sensitivity, high nonlinearity, high birefringence and low confinement loss for liquid analyte sensing applications

•Proposed PCF structure has high sensitivity, nonlinearity and birefringence with low confinement loss.•Demonstrates the significant effects on the performance of the proposed PCF for the 900 rotation of cladding.•Illustrates the effects of ellipticity constant of the tiny elliptic holes in the core.

This paper proposes the design and optimization of microstructure optical fiber for liquid sensing applications. A number of propagation characteristics have been compared between two formations of hexagonal cladding of our proposed PCF structure. The core of the proposed PCF structure is designed with two rows of supplementary elliptical air holes. We investigate the performance of the designed PCFs for Ethanol as a liquid sample to be sensed. Numerical analysis is carried out by employing the full vectorial Finite Element Method (FEM) to examine the modal birefringence, confinement loss, relative sensitivity and nonlinear coefficient of the proposed PCF structure.