Theoretical Study of a Tunable Low-Temperature Photonic Crystal Sensor Using Dielectric-Superconductor Nanocomposite Layers

One-dimensional hybrid photonic crystal made of a superconductor (YBa2Cu3O7) nanocomposite and dielectric material (silicon) is theoretically investigated by the two-fluid model and the transfer matrix method based on Tamm resonance. The structure consists of a ternary photonic crystal capped by metallic layer Ag. Interesting multi-photonic band gaps are achieved for a suitable hybrid periodic system. The characteristic of these multi-photonic band gaps can be manipulated by the temperature of the system. The proposed sensor records high sensitivity (from 1.1 to 2.2 nm/K), very high signal-to-noise (from 24 to 125), and low resolution (from 0.11 to 0.14). Compared with previous works, our proposed sensor can achieve high sensitivity for near-zero (K) temperature sensing.