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Published on: August 29, 2017
Lithographically-generated 3D lamella layers and their structural color
Sichao Zhang1, Yifang Chen1, Bingrui Lu1
1Nanolithography and Application Research Group, State Key Laboratory of ASIC and Systems, School of Information Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China. yifangchen@fudan.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Inspired by the structural color from the multilayer nanophotonic structures in Morpho butterfly wing scales, 3D lamellae layers in dielectric polymers (polymethyl methacrylate, PMMA) with n ∼ 1.5 were designed and fabricated by standard top-down electron beam lithography with one-step exposure followed by an alternating development/dissolution process of PMMA/LOR (lift-off resist) multilayers. This work offers direct proof of the structural blue/green color via lithographically-replicated PMMA/air multilayers, analogous to those in real Morpho butterfly wings. The success of nanolithography in this work for the 3D lamellae structures in dielectric polymers not only enables us to gain deeper insight into the mysterious blue color of the Morpho butterfly wings, but also breaks through the bottleneck in technical development toward broad applications in gas/liquid sensors, 3D meta-materials, coloring media, and infrared imaging devices, etc.
