Tunable Structural Color Images by UV-Patterned Conducting Polymer Nanofilms on Metal Surfaces

Precise manipulation of light-matter interactions has enabled a wide variety of approaches to create bright and vivid structural colors. Techniques utilizing photonic crystals, Fabry-Pérot cavities, plasmonics, or high-refractive-index dielectric metasurfaces have been studied for applications ranging from optical coatings to reflective displays. However, complicated fabrication procedures for sub-wavelength nanostructures, limited active areas, and inherent absence of tunability of these approaches impede their further development toward flexible, large-scale, and switchable devices compatible with facile and cost-effective production. Here, a novel method is presented to generate structural color images based on monochromic conducting polymer films prepared on metallic surfaces via vapor phase polymerization and ultraviolet (UV) light patterning. Varying the UV dose enables synergistic control of both nanoscale film thickness and polymer permittivity, which generates controllable structural colors from violet to red. Together with grayscale photomasks this enables facile fabrication of high-resolution structural color images. Dynamic tuning of colored surfaces and images via electrochemical modulation of the polymer redox state is further demonstrated. The simple structure, facile fabrication, wide color gamut, and dynamic color tuning make this concept competitive for applications like multifunctional displays.