Photonic crystals with tunability in the visible region are of great interest for controlling light diffraction. Mechanochromic photonic materials are periodically structured soft materials designed with a photonic stop-band that can be tuned by mechanical forces to reflect specific colours. Soft photonic materials with broad colour tunability and fast colour switching are invaluable for application. Here we report a novel mechano-actuated, soft photonic hydrogel that has an ultrafast-response time, full-colour tunable range, high spatial resolution and can be actuated by a very small compressive stress. In addition, the material has excellent mechanical stability and the colour can be reversibly switched at high frequency more than 10,000 times without degradation. This material can be used in optical devices, such as full-colour display and sensors to visualize the time evolution of complicated stress/strain fields, for example, generated during the motion of biological cells.

We propose a propulsion concept to drive a microairplane by laser that can be used for observation of climate and volcanic eruption. Since it does not have to develop thrust for vertical takeoff, and it has no engine in the normal sense, the microairplane can be very light, with its payload consisting only of observation and communication equipment. In order to demonstrate the concept, we succeeded in flying a paper microairplane driven by a 590 mJ, 5 ns pulse yttrium–aluminum–garnet laser that impinges on a double-layer “exotic target.” The coupling efficiency agrees well with simulations and with experiments.

This paper proposes a non-contact damage detection method based on Lamb waves generated by laser ablation (LA). Previously, Lamb waves generated by contact-type sensors such as acoustic emission or piezoelectric zirconate titanate devices have been studied to detect damage. Lamb wave generation systems with embedded contact-type excitation devices to objective structures to be inspected may quickly realize large-area damage detection on a huge object such as an aircraft. However, replacing contact-type devices with non-contact devices in Lamb wave generation systems, the systems will have sufficient potential to excite under the specific conditions such as submerged target structures in liquid and high-temperature substances. The LA-generated Lamb waves that have amplitudes several hundred times larger than those generated by conventional laser-thermoelastically generated Lamb waves are of advantage from the viewpoint of the signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. When the laser fluence reaches 10¹²–10¹⁴W/m², which is greater than that for laser-thermoelastic regime, a LA regime is induced. The amplitudes of the LA-generated Lamb waves might be higher than those of the laser-thermoelastically generated Lamb waves; this is within the scope of the assumption. Since the LA process entails a number of nonlinear processes such as melting, vaporization, and sublimation, it is important to confirm that LA could generate a Lamb wave and its mode. In this paper, Lamb waves that contain broadband frequency elements of more than several hundred kHz are generated by non-contact impulse excitation using LA, which is common in vibration tests in the high-frequency range, laser peening, propulsion of micro-aircraft, bolt loosening diagnosis, etc. The present method is evaluated by comparing the measured and calculated propagation phase and group velocities of the Lamb waves. Furthermore, the feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by non-contact damage detection against an aluminum alloy 2024 plate with a crack.