Abstract
Structural colour arising from nanostructured metallic surfaces offers many benefits compared to conventional pigmentation based display technologies, such as increased resolution and scalability of their optical response with structure dimensions. However, once these structures are fabricated their optical characteristics remain static, limiting their potential application. Here, by using a specially designed nanostructured plasmonic surface in conjunction with high birefringence liquid crystals, we demonstrate a tunable polarization-independent reflective surface where the colour of the surface is changed as a function of applied voltage. A large range of colour tunability is achieved over previous reports by utilizing an engineered surface which allows full liquid crystal reorientation while maximizing the overlap between plasmonic fields and liquid crystal. In combination with imprinted structures of varying periods, a full range of colours spanning the entire visible spectrum is achieved, paving the way towards dynamic pixels for reflective displays.
Highlights
Structural colour arising from nanostructured metallic surfaces offers many benefits compared to conventional pigmentation based display technologies, such as increased resolution and scalability of their optical response with structure dimensions
We develop design rules for maximizing the continuous tuning of plasmonic resonances based on finite-element method (FEM) and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations, which facilitate accurate predictions of the complex liquid crystals (LCs) orientation on the nanostructured surface and subsequent optical responses
The surface is used as part of a LC cell, in which the nanostructured aluminium serves as a bottom electrode
Summary
Structural colour arising from nanostructured metallic surfaces offers many benefits compared to conventional pigmentation based display technologies, such as increased resolution and scalability of their optical response with structure dimensions Once these structures are fabricated their optical characteristics remain static, limiting their potential application. Many of these examples deal with infrared or terahertz frequencies[15,16,17], and those that are in the visible regime remain limited to a small range of colour tunability due to the modest shifts (B10–40 nm) in plasmon resonance[18,19,20,21] While these works show that the phenomenon exists and can be controlled in a variety of ways, they all fall short of the tuning range needed for practical devices. Such an approach can lead to large area, thin-film display elements on rigid and flexible substrates, but can improve the active tunability of general plasmonic and metamaterial systems
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