ph7b01569_si_001.pdf (1.61 MB)
Engineering a Full Gamut of Structural Colors in All-Dielectric Mesoporous Network Metamaterials
journal contribution
posted on 2018-05-10, 12:23 authored by Alejandra Ruiz-Clavijo, Yoichiro Tsurimaki, Olga Caballero-Calero, George Ni, Gang Chen, Svetlana V. Boriskina, Marisol Martín-GonzálezStructural colors
are a result of the scattering of certain frequencies
of the incident light on micro- or nanoscale features in a material.
This is a quite different phenomenon from that of colors produced
by absorption of different frequencies of the visible spectrum by
pigments or dyes, which is the most common way of coloring used in
our daily life. However, structural colors are more robust and can
be engineered to span most of the visible spectrum without changing
the base material, only its internal structure. They are abundant
in nature, with examples as colorful as beetle shells and butterfly
wings, but there are few ways of preparing them for large-scale commercial
applications for real-world uses. In this work, we present a technique
to create a full gamut of structural colors based on a low-cost, robust,
and scalable fabrication of periodic network structures in porous
alumina as well as the strategy to theoretically predict and engineer
different colors on demand. We experimentally demonstrate mesoporous
network metamaterial structures with engineered colors spanning the
whole optical spectrum and discuss their applications in sensing,
environmental monitoring, biomimetic tissues engineering, etc.