The development of real-time and sensitive humidity sensors is in great demand from smart home automation and modern public health. We hereby proposed an ultrafast and full-color colorimetric humidity sensor that consists of chitosan hydrogel sandwiched by a disordered metal nanoparticle layer and reflecting substrate. This hydrogel-based resonator changes its resonant frequency to external humidity conditions because the chitosan hydrogels are swollen under wet state and contracted under dry state. The response time of the sensor is ~10
4
faster than that of the conventional Fabry-Pérot design. The origins of fast gas permeation are membrane pores created by gaps between the metal nanoparticles. Such instantaneous and tunable response of a new hydrogel resonator is then exploited for colorimetric sensors, anti-counterfeiting applications, and high-resolution displays.
Using the simple interference interactions in a three-layer thin film structure, absorbers in the near infrared with aesthetically pleasing reflective colouration were designed, fabricated, and characterised. By implementing the phase change material, vanadium dioxide (VO2), with its remarkable phase change properties, the absorbers are able to be switched between lower and higher absorption states depending on the external temperature. Conventional fabrication methods involving VO2 require an annealing process after deposition, but here, VO2 nanoparticles dispersed in a polymer mixture were employed to allow the simple and scalable spin coating process to be used, without the need for annealing. This simultaneously opens up the possibility of using flexible substrates for bendable devices. At a temperature of around 68 °C, a change in absorption of around 30% is observed between 800–1600 nm, while the vivid subtractive colours are maintained with almost no observable difference, on both silicon and flexible polymer-based substrates. The fabricated sample is robust to 2500 bending cycles, proving the possibility for scalable VO2 fabrication methods for practical applications.
Reconfigurable light absorbers have attracted much attention by providing additional optical responses and expanding the number of degrees of freedom in security applications. Fabry− Perot absorbers based on phase change materials with tunable properties can be implemented over large scales without the need for additional steps such as lithography, while exhibiting reconfigurable optical responses. However, a fundamental limitation of widely used phase change materials such as vanadium dioxide and germanium−antimony−tellurium-based chalcogenide glasses is that they have only two distinct phases; therefore, only two different states of optical properties are available. Here, we experimentally demonstrate active multilevel absorbers that are tuned by controlling the external temperature. This is produced by creating large-scale lithography-free multilayer structures with both undoped and tungsten-doped solution-processed monoclinicphase vanadium dioxide thin films. The doping of vanadium dioxide with tungsten allows for the modulation of the phase-transition temperature, which results in an extra degree of freedom and therefore an additional step for the tunable properties. The proposed multilevel absorber is designed and characterized both numerically and experimentally. Such large-scale multilevel tunable absorbers realized with nanoparticle-based solution fabrication techniques are expected to open the way for advanced thermo-optical cryptographic devices based on tunable reflective coloration and near-infrared absorption.
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