Recent progress on structural coloration

Abstract

Structural coloration generates colors by the interaction between incident light and micro-or nanoscale structures. It has received tremendous interest for decades, due to advantages including robustness against bleaching and environmentally friendly properties (compared with conventional pigments and dyes). As a versatile coloration strategy, the tuning of structural colors based on micro-and nanoscale photonic structures has been extensively explored and can enable a broad range of applications including displays, anti-counterfeiting, and coating. However, scholarly research on structural colors has had limited impact on commercial products because of their disadvantages in cost, scalability, and fabrication. In this review, we analyze the key challenges and opportunities in the development of structural colors. We first summarize the fundamental mechanisms and design strategies for structural colors while reviewing the recent progress in realizing dynamic structural coloration. The promising potential applications including optical information processing and displays are also discussed while elucidating the most prominent challenges that prevent them from translating into technologies on the market. Finally, we address the new opportunities that are underexplored by the structural coloration community but can be achieved through multidisciplinary research within the emerging research areas.

Advanced manufacturing of dielectric meta-devices

“…Through specific design and artificial arrangement, metasurfaces demonstrate a remarkable ability to manipulate the wavelength, amplitude, phase, and polarization of electromagnetic waves. This versatility finds applications in diverse fields such as metalenses [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] , metaholograms [21][22][23][24][25][26] , structural colors [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] , optical vortex generation [35][36][37][38][39][40] , spectrometers [41][42][43][44] , imaging [44][45][46][47] , sensing [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] , and beam manipulation [56][57]…”

Structural coloration: advancements and challenges

“…In Photonics Insights, Li et al have organized recent progress on structural coloration, encompassing all the issues and topics discussed earlier, thereby providing a comprehensive overview of advancements in structural coloration [11] . They begin with design strategies and working principles such as LSPR, gap plasmon, Mie resonance, and bound states in the continuum.…”