Two highly sensitive optical sensor topologies are proposed and simulated in this paper. The proposed structures are optimized to provide better performance characteristics such as sensitivity, detection limit, and quality factor. They are based on two-dimensional photonic crystals consisting of rectangular arrays of GaAs rods in SiO2 substrates. Such lattices have bandgaps for transverse magnetic modes. Two-dimensional finite difference time domain and plane wave expansion methods are used for the simulation and analysis of the refractive index sensors and particle swarm optimization method is used to optimize the structural parameters. The designed structures show a high sensitivity to refractive index variations. They are able to detect refractive indices from 1.33 to 1.5. An excellent figure of merit equal to 737 RIU−1 is observed for the proposed structure and a significant improvement is observed compared to the structures reported in the literature.