Blue iridescence is produced in the adaxial epidermal cell wall, which contains helicoid lamellae. The blue iridescence from cell surfaces is left-circularly polarized. The position of the silica granules is entrained by the helicoid microfibrillar layers, and granules accumulate at a uniform position within the helicoids, contributing to the structure that produces the blue iridescence, as part of the unit cell responsible for 2 ° Bragg scatter. Removal of silica from the walls eliminated the blue colour. Addition of silica nanoparticles on existing cellulosic lamellae is a novel mechanism for adding structural colour in organisms.
Light incident upon a periodically corrugated metal/dielectric interface can generate surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waves. This effect is used in many sensing applications. Similar metallodielectric nanostructures are used for light trapping in solar cells, but the gains are modest because SPP waves can be excited only at specific angles and with one linear polarization state of incident light. Here we report the optical absorptance of a metallic grating coupled to silicon oxide/oxynitride layers with a periodically varying refractive index, i.e., a 1D photonic crystal. These structures show a dramatic enhancement relative to those employing a homogeneous dielectric material. Multiple SPP waves can be activated, and both s- and p-polarized incident light can be efficiently trapped. Many SPP modes are weakly bound and display field enhancements that extend throughout the dielectric layers. These modes have significantly longer propagation lengths than the single SPP modes excited at the interface of a metallic grating and a uniform dielectric. These results suggest that metallic gratings coupled to photonic crystals could have utility for light trapping in photovoltaics, sensing, and other applications.
A 20-period-thick chiral sculptured thin film (STF) of zinc selenide was fabricated on a glass slide by thermal evaporation. A variable-angle spectroscopic system was devised and used to measure all eight of the circular remittances of the chiral STF as functions of the angle of incidence and the free-space wavelength. Thereby, the center wavelength and the bandwidth of the circular Bragg phenomenon exhibited by structurally chiral materials such as cholesteric liquid crystals and chiral STFs were comprehensively characterized for incidence angles in the range [0°,70°]. The experimental data were qualitatively compared with data calculated using a helicoidal model for the relative permittivity dyadic of the chiral STF, and assuming that all three eigenvalues of that dyadic obey the single-resonance Lorentz model. The chosen representation was found adequate to represent the blue shift of the centerwavelength with an increasing angle of incidence, but the Lorentz model requires modification to develop improved predictive capabilities.
Experimentation with obliquely incident light established that all four circular reflectances of a chiral sculptured thin film backed by a metallic mirror contain strong evidence of the circular Bragg phenomenon. When the mirror is removed, strong evidence of that phenomenon is found only in the spectrum of the co-polarized and co-handed reflectance.
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