Magnetic assembly and field-tuning of ellipsoidal-nanoparticle-based colloidal photonic crystals

Anisotropic nanostructures provide an additional degree of freedom for tailoring the collective properties of their ensembles. Using Fe@SiO2 nanoellipsoids as anisotropic building blocks, herein we demonstrate a new class of magnetically responsive photonic structures whose photonic properties can be dynamically tuned by controlling the direction of the magnetic fields they are exposed to. These novel photonic structures diffract at a minimum wavelength when the field direction is perpendicular to the incident angle, and a maximum wavelength when the field is switched to parallel direction; and the diffraction intensity reaches maximum values when the fields are either parallel or perpendicular to the incident light, and decreases when the field direction is moved off-angle.