Design and Self-Assembly of Polyhedron Particles to Construct Iridescent Structural Colors

Abstract

Polyhedron particles exhibit unique physical properties in constructing novel materials. Here, the polystyrene (PS) polyhedron particles were fabricated via dispersion polymerization, and their morphologies can be controlled by tuning the divinylbenzene (DVB) content and polarity of the reaction medium. The possible formation mechanism is the asymmetric distribution of cross-linked networks during the phase separation process. In addition, the large-scale iridescent structural colors based on polyhedrons were obtained and further explored their applications in smart displays. This presented method guides the fabrication of anisotropic particles and their further assembly to construct novel materials.

Recent progress in low‐swellable polymer‐based smart photonic crystal sensors

“…To this end, we also expect more specific stimuliswelling materials and micro-nano structure-modulated color-changing mechanisms to be applied to the construction of SPCSs. A large number of stimuli-responsive micronano structures will play important roles in SPCSs, possibly including 2D nano-to-micro structures, [37,294] surface wrinkles, [295,296] photonic porous microparticles, [279,285] quasiamorphous structures, [289,297] diffraction gratings, [298,299] bilayer photonic structures, [26,82] photonic microcapsules, [208,275] stratified porous structures, [300] particle-nested nanostructures, [271,301] periodic wavy structures, [302] woodpile PCs, [303] micro-sized bowl-array, [39] core-shell particles, [304] microbubbles, [305] polyhedron particle-arrays, [306] and so on. Moreover, some novel sensing-material systems, such as cholesteric liquid crystal [307][308][309] and blue-phase liquid crystal, [310][311][312] also show extraordinary sensing properties.…”