LAUSR

Abstract In this paper, we have reported the design considerations of a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based tapered fiber optic sensor by coating a thin film of platinum on a tapered fiber core followed by graphene-molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) monolayers. The theoretical study is based on five-layer matrix model. To see the effect of graphene-MoS2 over layers, performance parameters in terms of sensitivity and detection accuracy are evaluated for four taper profiles viz. exponential-linear, linear, parabolic and quadratic along with the taper ratio. From results, we inferred that with increase in taper ratio sensitivity also increases while detection accuracy decreases monotonically. For the proposed sensor configuration, maximum sensitivity value is found to be 7.04 μm/RIU at taper ratio 2.0 for exponential-linear taper profile while maximum detection accuracy obtained is 16.7623μm−1, at taper ratio 1.0. Thus, the results show that by introducing additional graphene-MoS2 monolayers, the sensitivity of the proposed sensing probe is enhanced by more than 44% at taper ratio 2 as compared to the conventionally used SPR based fiber optic sensors coated with platinum only. Also, the effect of increasing number of layers of graphene and MoS2 on the performance parameters is evaluated and compared. The advantageous features of the graphene and MoS2 layers have also been discussed for bio-sensing applications.