Dynamic plasmonic colour display

Xiaoyang Duan,Simon Kamin,Na Liu

doi:10.1038/ncomms14606

Abstract

Plasmonic colour printing based on engineered metasurfaces has revolutionized colour display science due to its unprecedented subwavelength resolution and high-density optical data storage. However, advanced plasmonic displays with novel functionalities including dynamic multicolour printing, animations, and highly secure encryption have remained in their infancy. Here we demonstrate a dynamic plasmonic colour display technique that enables all the aforementioned functionalities using catalytic magnesium metasurfaces. Controlled hydrogenation and dehydrogenation of the constituent magnesium nanoparticles, which serve as dynamic pixels, allow for plasmonic colour printing, tuning, erasing and restoration of colour. Different dynamic pixels feature distinct colour transformation kinetics, enabling plasmonic animations. Through smart material processing, information encoded on selected pixels, which are indiscernible to both optical and scanning electron microscopies, can only be read out using hydrogen as a decoding key, suggesting a new generation of information encryption and anti-counterfeiting applications.

Highlights

Plasmonic colour printing based on engineered metasurfaces has revolutionized colour display science due to its unprecedented subwavelength resolution and high-density optical data storage
Significant advances in plasmonic colour generation have been accomplished including the realization of colour displays at the optical diffraction limit[1,2,3], scalable full-colour chromotropic printing[4,5,6,7], actively tunable plasmonic surfaces[8,9,10,11], plasmonic colour laser printing[12]
We demonstrate a dynamic plasmonic display technique based on catalytic Mg metasurfaces

Summary

Results

Hysteresis is observed, when the colours of the palette evolve along the hydrogenation and dehydrogenation pathways, respectively This is seen from the recorded dynamic spectra of the selected colour squares as shown in Supplementary Fig. 4. One of the underlying design mechanisms lies in the fact that Mg particles of different sizes but identical interparticle distance are subject to dramatically distinct colour erasing times during hydrogenation To this end, fireworks I and IV are designed to display radially explosive effects. The accompanying movie is presented in Supplementary Movie 7 In this regard, information encoded on selected pixels, which are indiscernible to both optical and scanning electron microscopies, can only be read out using hydrogen as decoding key, demonstrating the superior security level of our display technique.

Design d 170

IV III

Methods

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