Structural colors are colors generated by the interaction between incident light and nanostructures. Structural colors have been studied for decades due to their promising advantages of long-term stability and environmentally friendly properties compared with conventional pigments and dyes. Previous studies have demonstrated many artificial structural colors inspired by naturally generated colors from plants and animals. Moreover, many strategies consisting of different principles have been reported to achieve dynamically tunable structural colors. Furthermore, the artificial structural colors can have multiple functions besides decoration, such as absorbing solar energy, anti-counterfeiting, and information encryption. In the present work, we reviewed the typical artificial structural colors generated by multilayer films, photonic crystals, and metasurfaces according to the type of structures, and discussed the approaches to achieve dynamically tunable structural colors.
A high-resolution miniature spectrometer has been demonstrated by utilizing a 128-channel integrated filter array, fabricated by using the combinatorial deposition technique, as a dispersive component whose passbands range from with a bandwidth (or spectral resolution) from and an average channel interval of . The miniature spectrometer is smaller than without any moving parts. This kind of miniature spectrometer has the advantages of very low payload, high resolution, and high reliability simultaneously, which are especially urgently needed for space applications.
Losses are the main evil that limits the use of metamaterials in practical applications. While radiation losses may be controlled by design, Joule losses are hereditary to the metamaterial structures. An exception is superconducting metamaterials, where Joule losses can be uniquely controlled with temperature in a very wide range. We put this in use by demonstrating temperature-dependent transmission in the millimeter-wave part of the spectrum in high-Tc superconducting cuprate metamaterials supporting sub-radiant resonances of Fano type.
Fueled by the rapid advancement of nanofabrication, metasurface has provided unprecedented opportunities for 3D holography. Large depth 3D meta-holography not only greatly increases information storage capacity, but also enables distinguishing of the relative spatial relationship of 3D objects, which has important applications in fields like optical information storage and medical diagnosis. Although the methods based on Fresnel diffraction theory can reconstruct the real depth information of 3D objects, the maximum depth is only 2 mm. Here, we develop a 3D meta-holography based on angular spectrum diffraction theory to break through the depth limit. By developing the angular spectrum diffraction theory into meta-holography, the metasurface structure with independent polarization control is used to create a polarization multiplexing 3D meta-hologram. The fabricated amorphous silicon metasurface increases the depth range by 47.5 times and realizes 0.95 dm depth reconstruction for polarization independent and different color 3D meta-hologram in visible. Such polarization controlled large-depth color meta-holography is expected to open avenue for data storage, display, information security and virtual reality.
Negative dielectric constant and dominant kinetic resistance make superconductors intriguing plasmonic media. Here we report on the first study of one of the most important and disputed manifestations of plasmonics, the effect of extraordinary transmission through an array of subwavelength holes, using a perforated film of high-temperature superconductor. We show that in the millimetric wave part of the spectrum exceptionally strong extraordinary transmission exists in the ideal conductor state, improves in the plasmonic regime of a superconductor, and diminishes in a highly lossy metal.