Cuttlefish Ink Tagged Photonic Crystal Particles and Their Ion-Responsive Construction

Colloidal crystal materials have potential values in coding, sensing, displaying and so on. Attempts to promote these values tend to focus on the development of functional colloidal crystal materials with high color saturations and bright structural colors for practical applications. Thus, this work presented novel cuttlefish ink nanoparticles doped colloidal crystal particle material, which had distinguishable and high saturation colors, and could response to the electric field and pH obviously. It was also found that the doping could result in a short-range order and long-range disorder structure of the colloidal crystals, which endowed them with wide viewing angles. More importantly, by using electric field and ions dual-responsive hydrogel to replicate the composite colloidal crystals particles, the resultant cuttlefish ink nanoparticles doped inverse opal particles were imparted with the same high saturation vivid structural colors, as well as obviously structural color tunability. These features make the cuttlefish ink nanoparticles doped colloidal crystal particles ideal for many practical applications where structural color materials is needed.