Color‐Tunable Poly ( N ‐Isopropylacrylamide) Microgel‐Based Etalons: Fabrication, Characterization, and Applications

A new look at effective interactions between microgel particles

“…Microgels are considered smart colloidal materials: in response to external parameters such as temperature, pH, ionic strength, light or electric field (depending on the nature of the polymers) a particle is able to change its size as well as other connected properties such as the polarizability [9] or elasticity of the particle [10,11]. Thus, they are promising for and already employed in several applications, such as photonic crystals [12,13], drug delivery systems [14][15][16] or nanotechnologies [17]. In addition, thanks to their high tunability and to their softness, microgels represent ideal model systems to study phase transitions [18][19][20][21][22] and glass or jamming transitions in dense colloidal dispersions [23][24][25].In the case of thermoresponsive microgels made of Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), the soft colloids are swollen below the volume phase transition temperature (VPTT) of 32 • C [26][27][28].…”