Structural Coloring of Glass Using Dewetted Nanoparticles and Ultrathin Films of Metals

Abstract

Metal nanoparticles have been used for coloring glass since antiquity. Colors are produced by light scattering and absorption associated with plasmon resonances of the particles. Recently, dewetting at high temperature has been demonstrated as a straightforward high-yield/low-cost technique for nanopatterning thin metal films into planar arrays of spherical nanocaps. Here, we show that by simply tuning the contact angle of the metal dewetted nanocaps one can achieve narrow resonances and large tunability compared with traditional approaches such as changing particle size. A vast range of colors is obtained, covering the whole visible spectrum and readily controlled by the choice of film thickness and materials. The small size of the particles results in a mild dependence on incidence illumination angle, whereas their high anisotropy gives rise to strong dichroism. We also show color tuning through 65 simple, low-cost lithography-free surface nanostructuring, 66 which is ideal for industrially scalable applications.

Self-assembled antireflection coatings for light trapping based on SiGe random metasurfaces

“…One viable and promising route is solid-state dewetting of ultra-thin films of metals 18,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] and semiconductors, [42][43][44][45][46] a natural phenomenon exploited for the self-assembly of high-quality photonic structures. The instability giving rise to the dewetting phenomenon in thin films is mediated by the surface diffusion of atoms and occurs upon annealing at high temperature (even well below the melting point of the material) [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] .…”

Active modulation of visible light with graphene-loaded ultrathin metal plasmonic antennas

“…In particular, plasmons in noble metal nanostructures can resonate at visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) frequencies, thus holding great potential for photonic technologies. This has stimulated a great deal of work over the last decade aiming to tailor the spatial and spectral properties of plasmons 2 , with applications such as metamaterial design 3,4 , optical biosensing 5-7 , spectrophotometry 8-10 , photocatalysis [11][12][13][14][15][16] , and coloring [17][18][19][20][21][22] . Control over the plasmon characteristics generally relies on the design of optimized nanostructure composition and morphology.…”

Near‐Field Optical Properties of Fully Alloyed Noble Metal Nanoparticles

“…[12][13][14][15] Thus, metallic nanostructures composed of Ag-Au can enable the rational design of building blocks for different applications, such as metamaterials, [16,17] hot carrier devices, [18] light absorption improvement in photovoltaics, [19,20] colored glasses, [21] displays, [22,23] and catalysis. Alloying of these noble metals has been applied to tune the material dielectric function, where the LSPR can be modulated progressively from the UV (pure Ag) to the NIR (pure Au).…”

“…They can be formed by colloidal synthesis via the reduction of precursors containing metals in solution, [25,26] and by the sequential pulsed laser deposition of Ag and Au targets, [27,28] which can yield large amounts of NPs with narrow size distribution. The dewetting of metallic thin films has also been used to fabricate pure [21,[30][31][32] and alloyed [19] metal NPs. [29] Alternatively, nanolithographic methods enable full control of NPs size, shape, and distribution.…”