Elliptical air hole PCF-based low-cost sensor for refractive index and temperature detection: Design and analysis

•This article proposed an elliptical air hole-based photonic crystal fiber (EH-PCF) with a circular ring at the core filled with platinum for temperature and refractive index sensing applications, simultaneously.•The proposed design displays the mode field density of −8.86e-14 w/m at the core, and two transmittance dips of −88 dB are obtained at 1.53 µm and ∼1.56 µm wavelength after simulation results.•One of the significant factors that affect the sensitivity of the sensor is mode confinement loss that is 6.5x104 dB/cm at 1.55 µm wavelength. The proposed sensor shows a sensitivity of 77 nm/°C for the temperature range of 20–160 °C and refractive index (RI) sensing in the range of 1.43 to 1.49 indicated the sensitivity of 1600 nm/RIU. Due to the complex RI, the ultranarrow bandgap is between the 0.10 to 0.11 frequency (w/2pic) for surface plasma resonance signals.•The fabrication of the proposed design is a simple, low-cost method and will be significantly suitable for integrated photonics, nanotechnology, industry 4.0, temperature sensing, and biomedical applications.