Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 19: Symposium on Bioinspired Functional Materials: From Nature’s Nanoarchitectures to Nanofabricated Designs

CPP 19.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 09:30–10:00, HSZ 02

New twists in biological photonics: circular polarisation and beyond. — •Pete Vukusic, Luke McDonald, and Ewan Finlayson — University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.

The evolution of structural colour mechanisms in many biological systems has given rise to many specialised and often highly functional optical effects both in animals and in plants. Recent scientific works yielded several examples that are being developed for use across technology. Among many thousands of biological systems, a distinctive example involving circular polarisation (CP) was described by Michelson himself: the scarab beetle Chrysina resplendens. Its exoskeleton has a bright, golden appearance that reflects both right-handed and left-handed CP light. The chiral nanostructure responsible for this is a helicoid comprising twisted birefringent dielectric planes. This presentation revisits the C. resplendens beetle, correlating details of its CP reflectance spectra directly with detailed analysis of its morphology that includes a chiral multilayer configuration comprising two chirped, left-handed, helicoids separated by a birefringent retarder. The system's optical behaviour is modelled using a scattering matrix simulation, where the optical roles of each component of the morphological substructure are elucidated. The C. resplendens' model is presented here, alongside summaries of other inspirational biological structural colour generation strategies, as a key example of highly adapted optical design.