Structural colours have drawn wide attention for their potential as a future printing technology for various applications, ranging from biomimetic tissues to adaptive camouflage materials. However, an efficient approach to realise robust colours with a scalable fabrication technique is still lacking, hampering the realisation of practical applications with this platform. Here we develop a new approach based on large scale network metamaterials, which combine dealloyed subwavelength structures at the nanoscale with loss-less, ultra-thin dielectrics coatings.
By using theory and experiments, we show how sub-wavelength dielectric coatings control a mechanism of resonant light coupling with epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) regions generated in the metallic network, manifesting the formation of highly saturated structural colours that cover a wide portion of the spectrum. The network-like architecture of these nanomaterials allows for high mechanical resistance, which is quantified in a series of nano-scratch tests. With such remarkable properties, these metastructures represent a robust design technology for real-world, large scale commercial applications.
Reference:
Scalable, ultra-resistant structural colors based on network metamaterials
Henning Galinski, Gael Favraud, Hao Dong, Juan S Totero Gongora, Grégory Favaro, Max Döbeli, Ralph Spolenak, Andrea Fratalocchi and Federico Capasso
Light: Science & Applications (2017) 6, e16233; doi: 10.1038/lsa.2016.233. , PDF
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