Samples of the cuticle taken from the body of Buprestidae Chrysochroa vittata have been studied by scanning electron microscopy and optical reflectance measurements, related to numerical simulations. The cause of the metallic coloration of the body of these insects is determined to be the structure of the hard carapace constructed as a stack of thin chitin layers separated by very thin irregular air gaps. In particular the change of color as a function of the observation angle is elucidated in terms of an infinite photonic-crystal model, confirmed by finite multilayer calculations. These mechanisms are used to develop an artificial bioinspired multilayer system which reproduces the visual effects provided by the insect surface.

We investigate optical excitations on single silver nanospheres and nanosphere composites with the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. Our objective is to achieve polarization control of the enhanced local field, pertinent to SERS applications. We employ dimer and quadrumer structures, which can display broadband and highly confined near-field-intensity enhancement comparable to or exceeding the resonant value of smaller sized isolated spheres. Our results demonstrate that the polarization of the enhanced field can be controlled by the orientation of the multimers in respect to the illumination, rather than the illumination itself. In particular, we report cases where the enhanced field shares the same polarization with the exciting field, and cases where it is predominantly perpendicular to the source field. We call the later phenomenon depolarized enhancement. Furthermore, we study a realizable nanolens based on a tapered self-similar silver nanosphere array. The time evolution of the fields in such structures show conversion of a diffraction limited Gaussian beam to a focused spot, through sequential coupling of the nano-array spheres' Mie-plasmons. For a longitudinally excited nanolens design we observed the formation of an isolated focus with size about one tenth the vacuum wavelength. We believe such nanolens will aid scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) detection and the excitation of surface plasmon based guiding devices.

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We propose a semi-infinite 1-D photonic crystal approach for designing artificial reflectors which aim to reproduce color changes with the angle of incidence found in biological periodic multilayer templates. We show that both the dominant reflected wavelength and the photonic bandgap can be predicted and that these predictions agree with exact calculations of reflectance spectra for a finite multilayer structure. In order to help the designer, the concept of spectral richness of angle-tuned color-selecting reflectors is introduced and color changes with angle are displayed in a chromaticity diagram. The usefulness of the photonic crystal approach is demonstrated by modelling a biological template (found in the cuticle of Chrysochora vittata beetle) and by designing a bio-inspired artificial reflector which reproduces the visual aspect of the template. The bioinspired novel aspect of the design relies on the strong unbalance between the thicknesses of the two layers forming the unit cell.

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