Performance Evaluation of Biophotonic Cholesterol Sensor Using 1D Photonic Crystal Cavity Structure

Abstract

An efficient biochemical sensor for the detection of cholesterol concentration using a 1-dimensional photonic crystal (1D-PhC) based cavity structure has been proposed in this paper. The structure comprises 1-dimensional alternating dielectric photonic crystal designed as (A/B)2/Dd/(A/B)2 for measuring cholesterol concentration in blood, where ‘A’ and ‘B’ represent high and low refractive index materials, respectively. A cavity containing the cholesterol is inserted in the middle of the structure to assess its concentration. The transfer matrix method is used to analyze the reflection characteristics of the proposed multilayer structure. Sensitivity is analyzed by taking the difference in shifted resonant wavelength by infiltrating varying cholesterol concentrations ranging from 200 to 300 mg/dl. After rigorous optimization, it has been observed that the maximum sensitivity of 2.9 nm/(mg/dl) or 325 nm/RIU can be achieved.