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Biological systems serve as fundamental sources of inspiration for the development of artificially colored devices, and their investigation provides a great number of photonic design opportunities. While several successful biomimetic designs have been detailed in the literature, conventional fabrication techniques nonetheless remain inferior to their natural counterparts in complexity, ease of production and material economy. Here, we investigate the iridescent neck feathers of Anas platyrhynchos drakes, show that they feature an unusual arrangement of two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystals and further exhibit a superhydrophobic surface, and mimic this multifunctional structure using a nanostructure composite fabricated by a recently developed top-down iterative size reduction method, which avoids the above-mentioned fabrication challenges, provides macroscale control and enhances hydrophobicity through the surface structure. Our 2D solid core photonic crystal fibres strongly resemble drake neck plumage in structure and fully polymeric material composition, and can be produced in wide array of colors by minor alterations during the size reduction process.

The melt-infiltration technique enables the fabrication of complex nanostructures for a wide range of applications in optics, electronics, biomaterials, and catalysis. Here, anemone-like nanostructures are produced for the first time under the surface/interface principles of melt-infiltration as a non-lithographic method. Functionalized anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes are used as templates to provide large-area production of nanostructures, and polycarbonate (PC) films are used as active phase materials. In order to understand formation dynamics of anemone-like structures finite element method (FEM) simulations are performed and it is found that wetting behaviour of the polymer is responsible for the formation of cavities at the caps of the structures. These nanostructures are examined in the surface-enhanced-Raman-spectroscopy (SERS) experiment and they exhibit great potential in this field. Reproducible SERS signals are detected with relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 7.2-12.6% for about 10,000 individual spots. SERS measurements are demonstrated at low concentrations of Rhodamine 6G (R6G), even at the picomolar level, with an enhancement factor of ∼10(11). This high enhancement factor is ascribed to the significant electric field enhancement at the cavities of nanostructures and nanogaps between them, which is supported by finite difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations. These novel nanostructured films can be further optimized to be used in chemical and plasmonic sensors and as a single molecule SERS detection platform.

requires a large transistor width and a short transistor channel length in order to excel in the mentioned attributes. [7][8][9][10] From the architectural perspective, in an integrated pixelated device, transistors should also have small footprints so that light-emitting/-sensing devices can occupy larger areas on each pixel. Yet for planar OFETs, the device area increases with the width and decreasing the channel length demands high-resolution patterning. A vertical geometry allows reduced area requirements by employing a submicrometer thick organic film as the transistor channel. [11,12] However, when the channel length of an OFET approaches the 100 nm regime, high electric fields result in large bulk current densities that cannot be modulated efficiently via a gate-field. [13][14][15] This phenomenon is known as the shortchannel effect and it restricts further improvement of vertical OFETs (VOFETs).In this report, a novel VOFET geometry is demonstrated addressing the short-channel effect, in particular by suppressing the undesired bulk current. It is based on a gate electrode consisting of massively parallel highly doped silicon nanopillars (Figure 1). Crucially different from other VOFETs, an insulating layer is deposited on top of the bottom contact in order to force injection of the charge carriers only from the sides of the bottom metal, and current flow within a thin layer close to the gate dielectric, minimizing space-charge limited current through the bulk semiconductor. Thanks to this unique geometry, ON/OFF ratios up to 10 6 can be realized, i.e., at least three orders of magnitude larger than in previously reported short-channel (100 nm) VOFETs. [11,15] In order to fabricate the nanopillars with a high areal density (≈10 6 pillars mm −2 ), optical resist dots (100 nm radius) arranged in a hexagonal lattice (250 nm lattice constant) are created using displacement Talbot lithography (DTL). It allows for fast wafer-scale patterning. [16] This resist dot pattern acts as an etch mask during etching of about 300 nm into the underlying silicon. Since the silicon is highly doped p-type (resistivity of 0.010-0.025 Ω cm), it can be directly used as a massively parallel nanopillar gate electrode for a single device (≈7 × 10 5 pillars per device of total size 0.7 µm 2 ). In our experiments, we use bulk silicon wafers, but silicon-on-insulator wafers can be used in order to electrically separate individual many-pillar devices. A stoichiometric low-pressure chemical-vapor-deposited (LPCVD) 45 nm silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) isolates these A unique vertical organic field-effect transistor structure in which highly doped silicon nanopillars are utilized as a gate electrode is demonstrated. An additional dielectric layer, partly covering the source, suppresses bulk conduction and lowers the OFF current. Using a semiconducting polymer as active channel material, short-channel (100 nm) transistors with ON/OFF current ratios up to 10 6 are realized. The electronic behavior is explained using space-charge and contact-lim...

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