Photonic Papers and Inks: Color Writing with Colorless Materials
From Soft-Matter
(Under Construction: Ian Burgess, Spring 2012)
Contents
References
H. Fudouzi, Y.N. Xia, Photonic Papers and Inks: Color Writing with Colorless Materials, Advanced Materials, 15, 892-896 (2003).
Keywords
Summary
This paper describes a technique to exploit solvent swelling of an elastomeric matrix as a photonic ink, capable of writing color patterns while each component material is "colorless" (i.e. does not absorb visible light).
Discussion
The ink/paper system is based on an elastomeric matrix (polydimethylsiloxane, PDMS) that contains an embedded regular lattice of polystyrene (PS) microshperes. A scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of the structure is shown in the figure below (left figure, B). This dielectric superstructure with wavelength-scale periodicity
