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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten

DS 10: Plasmonics and Nanophotonics I (Joint Session DS/O/HL)

DS 10.2: Vortrag

Dienstag, 23. März 2010, 10:45–11:00, H2

Mixing colours like nature — •Mathias Kolle, Maik Scherer, Pedro Cunha, Fumin Huang, Jeremy Baumberg, and Ullrich Steiner — Cavendish Laboratories, University of Cambridge, UK

Biomimetic attempts to produce novel photonic structures have attracted increasing research interest in recent years. Nature offers us an enormous amount of multifunctional micro- and nanostructures, that provide outstanding, distinctive, dynamic and tailored colouration. A “brilliant” example is the indonesian butterfly papilio blumei, whose wing scales are covered with 5-10µm wide concavities, that are cladded with a perforated cuticle multilayer. The regularly shaped multilayer structure gives rise to very impressive colour mixing effects, accompanied by controlled change in light polarisation.

We have successfully replicated the intricate photonic structure of papilio blumei on the cm²-scale in four simple steps involving colloidal templating, electrochemical growth and atomic layer deposition. A small conceptual modification of the original photonic structure leads to a completely different optical effect. Any freely chosen colour and its complementary hue can be separated and reflected into different directions while conserving a particular polarisation effect.

Since the procedures are easily up-scaleable, these biomimetic photonic structures have a huge potential for industrial applications in security printing, encoding of information, non-emissive display technology and other fields where distinct colours play an important role.