Highly Efficient Fabricating Amorphous Photonic Crystals Using Less Polar Solvents and the Wettability‐Based Information Storage and Recognition

Abstract

AbstractFacile and efficient fabrication of amorphous photonic crystals (APCs) with uniform and angle independent structural colors is highly desired due to their unique applications in non‐iridescent colors‐based displays, pigments, and sensors. Here, a solvent‐assisted colloidal assembly approach is reported to fabricate APCs with uniform and angle‐independent structural colors by the self‐assembly of polydopamine‐embedded silica particles in pentanol. The surface charge of the particle mediated by the polarity of solvent is demonstrated to be the key to control the particle arrangements and the angle dependency of the structural colors, which makes the fabrication more efficient, simple, and convenient compared to previous methods. Owing to the amorphous structures, the APCs show unique sensitivity to the variation of the refractive index contrast. Based on this unique sensitivity of APCs, an information storage‐recognition system is established by constructing different wettability between the information and background region. The information integrated with the color, the number, and the site of APCs of the system can be stored and recognized at dry and wetting state, respectively, and the switching of the storage‐recognition process is fully reversible. These findings provide new insights into the design, fabrication, and application of materials with non‐iridescent structural colors.