An Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor Employing a Polymer-Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper theoretically addresses the design and analysis of a pressure sensor by polymer defect. The range of sensor is effectively from 0 MPa to 3 MPa. PMMA is better than PS polymer in the pressure sensing application.

All the work can be a high-performance pressure sensor, also can be take a part in photonic integrated circuits. Overall, I find this work to be a valuable work with broad practical and academic significance. Here are comments that need the authors to address:

 

1.      Polymer materials play an important role in this manuscript, how the authors chose the two materials PMMA and PS, and why the more common and cheaper PVA was excluded.

2.      Is there a relationship between these optical properties and the length of the polymer chains? Or do they simply depend on the refraction coefficient?

3.  Regarding the section on optical simulation, how can its accuracy be determined?

Author Response

Authors' Response to Reviewers’ comments

 

 

Manuscript ID: photonics-2419749

Title: n Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal

Journal: Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732)

Authors: Ayman A. Ameen, Abinash Panda, Ahmed Mehaney, AbdulKarem H. M. Almawgani, Dipika D. Pradhan, Ghassan Ahmed Ali, Yahya Ali Abdelrahman Ali and Hussein A. Elsayed

Dear Editorial Board of Photonics Journal:

Thanks a lot for your efforts in reviewing our manuscript. We’d like also to thank the reviewers for either their encouraging words of potential acceptance or their valuable comments and recommendations.

We have made our best to modify our manuscript to match the reviewers' comments and recommendations. In accordance, further explanation and comments have been added to the revised version of our paper.

Meanwhile, all changes have been underlined and re-written in red within the body of our revised manuscript.

In the following, we address a specific point by point response to the reviewers' comments:

 

Response to Referee: 1

This paper theoretically addresses the design and analysis of a pressure sensor by a polymer defect. The range of sensor is effectively from 0 GPa to 3 GPa. PMMA is better than PS polymer in the pressure sensing application.

All the work can be a high-performance pressure sensor, also can be take a part in photonic integrated circuits. Overall, I find this work to be a valuable work with broad practical and academic significance. Here are comments that need the authors to address:

1. Polymer materials play an important role in this manuscript, how the authors chose the two materials PMMA and PS, and why the more common and cheaper PVA was excluded.

 Authors' response:

We would like to present our deep thanks for your efforts, comments, and recommendations in reviewing our work. For this comment, the main reason around our choice for these materials is due to their great sensitivity to the pressure variations compared to other dielectric and semiconductor materials. On other words, the acousto-optic response of polystyrene (PS) and the polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) polymer materials are very promising compared to Si and SiO₂. In particular, little changes in the value of the applied pressure leads to significant changes in their indices of refraction unlike Si and SiO₂ as shown in the figure listed below.

 

Figure (1). The effect of pressure variation on the indices of refraction for, a) SiO₂,    b) Si,     and     c) PS.

The figure shows that the refractive index of PS have a significant drops as the value of the applied pressure changes from 0 to 3 GPa unlike SiO₂ and Si. Here, the refractive index of PS is decreased from 1.565 to 1.074 by 0.491 due to the applied pressure. In contrast, the changes in the indices of refraction for both SiO₂ and Si are not exceedingly over 0.029 and 0.012, respectively. This response is due to the high values of stress optic constants of PS compared to SiO₂ and Si as previously introduced in references (41, 41). Therefore, the dependence on PS and PMMA provide a significant role on the tunability of the resonant mode, hence a promising performance in the vicinity of sensitivity could be investigated.

Then, for PVA as a cheaper and more common polymer material, it could provide a promising response regarding a highly sensitive pressure sensor. However, the main obstacle regarding the utilization of this material is elucidated in the lack of sufficient information about its stress optic constants. We cope to provide a complete survey for its stress optic constants regarding some similar future work.

 

2. Is there a relationship between these optical properties and the length of the polymer chains? Or do they simply depend on the refraction coefficient?

Authors' response:

Actually, the main idea regarding the variation of the refractive indices of the considered materials and their optical properties as well is based on the changes in their stress optic constants with the applied pressure. In fact, its possible to obtain some variations on the length of the polymer chain with the applied pressure that may provide some effects on the stress optic coefficients and the indices of refraction as well. In conclusion, the main role is completely connected with the changes in the indices of refraction due to the applied pressure.

 

3. Regarding the section on optical simulation, how can its accuracy be determined?

Authors' response:

Actually, the section of the optical properties was investigated based on the well-known transfer matrix method. In particular, this method is very popular and widely demonstrated through the studies of the 1D PCs problems. In addition, it provides a sufficient coincidence with most of the experimental verifications of the 1D PC designs (https://doi.org/10.1134/S0030400X17030201, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2336346, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physleta.2012.01.044, and https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6259-4_25).  

We hope this response meets the reviewers' comments and their points of view. In case the reviewers have any other comments, we are willing to carry out them all to match their requirements. Looking forward to hearing of acceptance of our contribution.

With respect in advance.

 

The corresponding author;

Ahmed Mehaney

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented article ‘An Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal’ is comprehensive and well supported by the experimental results although requires a few clarifications prior to being accepted for publication.   

1. The role/ importance of the defect layer is not very clear in the APC design. Can the authors give suitable explanations?

2. How the authors determined the ?1 = 108 ??,  ?2 = 254 ?m and ?? = 234 nm?

 

3. A comparison with existing literature is missing which would clearly represent the novelty of the APC design over the others. 

Author Response

Journal: Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732)

Authors: Ayman A. Ameen, Abinash Panda, Ahmed Mehaney, AbdulKarem H. M. Almawgani, Dipika D. Pradhan, Ghassan Ahmed Ali, Yahya Ali Abdelrahman Ali and Hussein A. Elsayed

Dear Editorial Board of Photonics Journal:

Thanks a lot for your efforts in reviewing our manuscript. We’d like also to thank the reviewers for either their encouraging words of potential acceptance or their valuable comments and recommendations.

We have made our best to modify our manuscript to match the reviewers' comments and recommendations. In accordance, further explanation and comments have been added to the revised version of our paper.

Meanwhile, all changes have been underlined and re-written in red within the body of our revised manuscript.

In the following, we address a specific point by point response to the reviewers' comments:

Response to Referee: 2

The presented article ‘An Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal’ is comprehensive and well supported by the experimental results although requires a few clarifications prior to being accepted for publication.  

1. The role/ importance of the defect layer is not very clear in the APC design. Can the authors give suitable explanations?

Authors' response:

Thank you for your useful comments concerning our manuscript and your suggestions for this work. For this comment, we added a new paragraph through the results and discussion section of the revised version to highlight the role of the defect layer through the designed structure.

 

2. How the authors determined the ?1 = 108 ??, ?2 = 254 ?m and ?? = 234 nm?

Authors' response:

Thanks a lot for your valuable comment. Actually, we discovered that these symbols are not written in the correct manner. Therefore, we have used the symbols (γ₀) to define the core radius of the designed structure, d₁ to define the thickness of SiO₂ layer, d₂ for the thickness of Si layer and d_d for the thickness of the defect layer. Then, γ₁ = γ₀ + d₁, γ₂ = γ₀ +( d₁ + d₂) and γ_d = γ₀ + (N/2)(d₁ + d₂) with N as an even number of periods. Finally, the schematic diagram in figure one was replaced with another new one to fix and clarify all of these issues. In addition, we went carefully through our paper to modify all of these typos.

3. 
   A comparison with existing literature is missing which would clearly represent the novelty of the APC design over the others.

Authors' response:

Thanks a lot for your valuable recommendation, we added a new table (Table 3) through the results and discussion section to compare our findings with the most available ones.

 

We hope this response meets the reviewers' comments and their points of view. In case the reviewers have any other comments, we are willing to carry out them all to match their requirements. Looking forward to hearing of acceptance of our contribution.

With respect in advance.

 

The corresponding author;

Ahmed Mehaney

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In the manuscript titled with “An Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal”, the authors theoretically studied a polymer defect-based 1D annular photonic crystal pressure sensor. It is an interesting work and well presented. I recommend to accept in the present form.

Author Response

Authors' Response to Reviewers’ comments

 

 

Manuscript ID: photonics-2419749

Title: n Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal

Journal: Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732)

Authors: Ayman A. Ameen, Abinash Panda, Ahmed Mehaney, AbdulKarem H. M. Almawgani, Dipika D. Pradhan, Ghassan Ahmed Ali, Yahya Ali Abdelrahman Ali and Hussein A. Elsayed

Dear Editorial Board of Photonics Journal:

Thanks a lot for your efforts in reviewing our manuscript. We’d like also to thank the reviewers for either their encouraging words of potential acceptance or their valuable comments and recommendations.

We have made our best to modify our manuscript to match the reviewers' comments and recommendations. In accordance, further explanation and comments have been added to the revised version of our paper.

Meanwhile, all changes have been underlined and re-written in red within the body of our revised manuscript.

In the following, we address a specific point by point response to the reviewers' comments:

Response to Referee: 3

In the manuscript titled with “An Investigation of High-Performance Pressure Sensor by Employing Polymer Defect-Based 1D Annular Photonic Crystal”, the authors theoretically studied a polymer defect-based 1D annular photonic crystal pressure sensor. It is an interesting work and well presented. I recommend to accept in the present form.

Authors' response:

We would like to present our deep thanks for your encouraging words of potential acceptance.

We hope this response meets the reviewers' comments and their points of view. In case the reviewers have any other comments, we are willing to carry out them all to match their requirements. Looking forward to hearing of acceptance of our contribution.

With respect in advance.

 

The corresponding author;

Ahmed Mehaney

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No more review comments.