Saturday, June 13, 2015

Plasmonic nanostructures for color filtering and nano printing technologies

This is pretty cool technology coming out of Missouri University of Science and Technology and Sandia National Laboratories. 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. In this demonstration a PVD stack of 100 nm silver / 45 nm SiO2 / 25 nm silver is used. The complete stack is deposited on a Kurt J. Lesker PVD tool and final protection by thin oxide. 

Check out Prof. Xiaodong Yang, at Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Missouri University of Science and Technology for more interesting nano structures like Photonic crystals and photonic crystal cavities

Structural color printing based on plasmonic metasurfaces of perfect light absorption (Open Access)

Fei Cheng, Jie Gao, Ting S. Luk & Xiaodong Yang
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 11045 doi:10.1038/srep11045 
Published 05 June 2015



(a) Schematic view of four unit cells for triangular-lattice circular hole arrays fabricated on the silver-silica-silver three layer structure. (b) An example of SEM cross-section image of the metasurface structure with period (P) of 320 nm and hole radius (r) of 100 nm. (c–e) SEM images of three metasurfaces with different lattice geometrical parameters (c: P = 130 nm, r = 35 nm; d: P = 200 nm, r = 50 nm; e: P = 260 nm, r = 65 nm). Insets: Optical reflection microscopy images of the entire 20 × 20 μm2 circular hole arrays of triangular lattice. Scale bars: 500 nm.

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.



(a) The original athletics mark image adapted with permission from The Curators of the University of Missouri. (b) SEM image of the fabricated pattern containing six different triangular lattices and corresponding colors shown in panel e. (c) SEM image of the area outlined in panel f. (d) Optical microscopy image of a plasmonic reproduction of the original mark image shown in panel e, containing only yellow and green colors. (e) Optical microscopy image of the plasmonic print presenting another four distinct colors (symbol ‘&’: orange, character ‘S, T’: magenta, pickaxe shape: cyan and word ‘MISSOURI’: navy blue) besides two original colors shown in panel d. Scale bars: 10 μm (b, d and e); 2 μm (c).



Note: The article has been distributed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license (please see the article itself for the license version number). You may reuse this material without obtaining permission from Nature Publishing Group

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