The dazzling colors of peacock feathers arise from the physical interaction of light with biological nanostructures. Researchers have now discovered how to exploit this natural trickery, known as structural coloration, into a large-scale printing technology that produces lightweight and ultra-resistant coatings in any color desirable.

Researchers routinely produce photonic structures to influence the behavior of light for applications such as fiber-optic communications. Many groups have used photonic technology to generate new forms of artificial structural colors that take advantage of the entire spectrum of visible light.

The team was inspired by the nanoporous feathers of the plum-throated cotinga bird. Image credit: Gregory Smith, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.Moving this technology out of the lab is challenging, however, because photonic nanostructures are often fragile and difficult to produce in practical quantities.

Researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Harvard University and ETH Zurich have now used wet chemical techniques to help overcome the difficulties of scaling-up photonic colors. Inspired by the nanoporous feathers of the plum-throated cotinga bird, the team’s approach began by sputtering a platinum/aluminum-based alloy onto a target surface. Then, a process called dealloying dissolved most of the aluminum and caused the remaining metal to reorganize into a bumpy network featuring open nanopores.

Next, the researchers deposited an ultra-thin layer of protective sapphire onto the metal network to both protect the surface and modify the way in which light interacts with the photonic nanopores. Surprisingly, slight changes of the sapphire thickness, from 7 to 53 nanometers, yielded remarkable color changes—the initially transparent film underwent stepwise transitions to yellow, orange, red and blue tones.

“Controlling these colors is experimentally very simple and uses coating technologies that are cheap and easily implemented,” says Andrea Fratalocchi, associate professor of electrical engineering at KAUST. “However, understanding how the complex light-matter interactions generate colors took months of work.”

The team’s high-level simulations determined that color generation begins when light strikes the metal and generates wave-like entities known as surface plasmons. As the plasmons interact with the randomly distributed pores, they become trapped, and modulations in the coating’s refractive index produce epsilon-near-zero regions in the nanopores where waves propagate extremely slowly. Adding the sapphire film causes additional reflections of the trapped waves, which create a flow of saturated color through resonance effects.

Fratalocchi notes that the way colors are formed in this structure can open the way for "programmable" nanomaterials for many applications: “Imagine a scratch on a car that can be repainted with an extremely thin material without other expensive procedures, or as a lightweight, maintenance-free way to coat airplanes.”