Inkjet Printing of Patterned, Multispectral, and Biocompatible Photonic Crystals

Patterning of photonic crystals to generate rationally designed color-responsive materials has drawn considerable interest because of promising applications in optical storage, encryption, display, and sensing. Here, an inkjet-printing based strategy is presented for noncontact, rapid, and direct approaches to generate arbitrarily patterned photonic crystals. The strategy is based on the use of water-soluble biopolymer-based opal structures that can be reformed with high resolution through precise deposition of fluids on the photonic crystal lattice. The resulting digitally designed photonic lattice formats simultaneously exploit structural color and material transience opening avenues for information encoding and combining functions of optics, biomaterials, and environmental interfaces in a single device.