Polarization tunable all-dielectric color filters based on cross-shaped Si nanoantennas

Vishal Vashistha,Gayatri Vaidya,Maciej Krawczyk,Pawel Gruszecki,Andriy E Serebryannikov

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-07986-z

Vishal Vashistha, Gayatri Vaidya + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07986-z

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Abstract

Polarization sensitive and insensitive color filters have important applications in the area of nano-spectroscopy and CCD imaging applications. Metallic nanostructures provide an efficient way to design and engineer ultrathin color filters. These nanostructures have capability to split the white light into fundamental colors and enable color filters with ultrahigh resolution but their efficiency can be restricted due to high losses in metals especially at the visible wavelengths. In this work, we demonstrate all-dielectric color filters based on Si nanoantennas, which are sensitive to incident-wave polarization and, thus, tunable with the aid of polarization angle variation. Two different information can be encoded in two different polarization states in one nanostructure. The nanoantenna based pixels are highly efficient and can provide high quality of colors, in particular, due to low losses in Si at optical frequencies. We experimentally demonstrate that a variety of colors can be achieved by changing the physical size of the nonsymmetric cross-shaped nanoantennas. The proposed devices allow to cover an extended gamut of colors on CIE-1931 chromaticity diagram owing to the existence of high-quality resonances in Si nanoantennas. Significant tunability of the suggested color filters can be achieved by varying polarization angle in both transmission and reflection mode. Additional tunability can be obtained by switching between transmission and reflection modes.

Highlights

Plasmonic nanostructures suggest a new platform for future printing technology, which promises to replace the old one that is based on organic dyes[1,2,3,4]
Another methodology is based on the use of complementary design methods with the hope of high-quality saturated colors[32], which can cover a wide gamut on CIE-1931 chromaticity diagram
These filters operate in reflection mode and show high quality of the colors on the chromaticity diagram

Summary

Introduction

Plasmonic nanostructures suggest a new platform for future printing technology, which promises to replace the old one that is based on organic dyes[1,2,3,4]. The new era in color filter technology is connected with the concept of light-matter interaction, that allows to engineer color filters having several important advantages over organic dyes based printing technology[5] These advantages include ultra-small size, low power consumption, everlasting colors, and high-resolution wide color gamut even below the diffraction limit[6,7,8,9]. We demonstrate all-dielectric, polarization sensitive color filters, which are composed of nonsymmetric Si nanoantennas, unlike the earlier reported ones that use metal based plasmonic nanoantennas[14,15,16,17]. In contrast with the recently reported color filters, the proposed device combines advantages of all-dielectric design and related wide gamut of highly saturated colors with advantages of sensitivity to polarization and dual mode operation

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Results

Conclusion