Abstract

Subwavelength structural color filtering and printing technologies employing plasmonic nanostructures have recently been recognized as an important and beneficial complement to the traditional colorant-based pigmentation. However, the color saturation, brightness and incident angle tolerance of structural color printing need to be improved to meet the application requirement. Here we demonstrate a structural color printing method based on plasmonic metasurfaces of perfect light absorption to improve color performances such as saturation and brightness. Thin-layer perfect absorbers with periodic hole arrays are designed at visible frequencies and the absorption peaks are tuned by simply adjusting the hole size and periodicity. Near perfect light absorption with high quality factors are obtained to realize high-resolution, angle-insensitive plasmonic color printing with high color saturation and brightness. Moreover, the fabricated metasurfaces can be protected with a protective coating for ambient use without degrading performances. The demonstrated structural color printing platform offers great potential for applications ranging from security marking to information storage.

Highlights

  • The color brightness and saturation[18,19,24,25,26]

  • Silver is selected as the metallic material due to its low absorption loss in visible frequencies so that relatively sharper plasmonic resonances can be obtained for achieving better color saturation which is desirable in practical color printing applications

  • The top silver layer is patterned with circular hole arrays of triangular lattice by using the focused ion beam (FIB) milling (FEI Helios Nanolab 600 DualBeam system)

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Summary

Introduction

The color brightness and saturation (or purity)[18,19,24,25,26]. From the respect of structures adopted, for example, reflection configurations based on localized plasmonic resonances exhibit weak angular dependence[19] but suffer from the relatively large radiative damping due to low quality factor (Q-factor) dipolar resonances[18,19,27]. For practical color printing applications where a high color brightness and saturation are preferred, it is necessary to achieve color filtering with low cross-talk[25] and reasonably high optical reflection efficiency for three primary colors (cyan-magenta-yellow, CMY system). To meet this end, in this paper a simple but efficient structural color printing platform is introduced based on plasmonic metasurface with a thin-layer metal-dielectric-metal (MIM) structure, by which pure perfect absorption resonances with high Q-factor are tailored throughout the entire visible frequency range. The resonance wavelength redshift induced by the polymer layer can be compensated by the geometrical adjustment

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