Tunable Design of Structural Colors Produced by Pseudo-1D Photonic Crystals of Graphene Oxide

It is broadly observed that graphene oxide (GO) films appear transparent with a thickness of about several nanometers, whereas they appear dark brown or almost black with thickness of more than 1 μm. The basic color mechanism of GO film on a sub-micrometer scale, however, is not well understood. This study reports on GO pseudo-1D photonic crystals (p1D-PhCs) exhibiting tunable structural colors in the visible wavelength range owing to its 1D Bragg nanostructures. Striking structural colors of GO p1D-PhCs could be tuned by simply changing either the volume or concentration of the aqueous GO dispersion during vacuum filtration. Moreover, the quantitative relationship between thickness and reflection wavelength of GO p1D-PhCs has been revealed, thereby providing a theoretical basis to rationally design structural colors of GO p1D-PhCs. The spectral response of GO p1D-PhCs to humidity is also obtained clearly showing the wavelength shift of GO p1D-PhCs at differently relative humidity values and thus encouraging the integration of structural color printing and the humidity-responsive property of GO p1D-PhCs to develop a visible and fast-responsive anti-counterfeiting label. The results pave the way for a variety of potential applications of GO in optics, structural color printing, sensing, and anti-counterfeiting.