design of a wide ranging highly sensitive pressure sensor based on two-dimensional photonic crystals

A highly sensitive pressure sensor operating over a wide pressure range based on two-dimensional photonic crystals having a mach-zehnder interferometer structure has been developed. the plane wave expansion method (pwe) is used to determine the device operating wavelength range. the finite difference time domain method (fdtd) is used to calculate the device characteristic parameters such as the resonant frequency, the power transmission, and the sensitivity. the present sensor has two wide frequency ranges, a high sensitivity to refractive index changes and the highest detectable sensitivity pressure so far reported in the literature, that is, 25.06 nm/gpa. the present device has high and constant transmission power all over the entire pressure range 0 to 10 gpa. this is of practical importance since the constraints imposed on the sensing system (the light source and the photodetector) are the same.