Ultralight plasmonic structural color paint.

All present commercial colors are based on pigments. While such traditional pigment-based colorants offer a commercial platform for large-volume and angle insensitiveness, they are limited by their instability in atmosphere, color fading, and severe environmental toxicity. Commercial exploitation of artificial structural coloration has fallen short due to the lack of design ideas and impractical nanofabrication techniques. Here, we present a self-assembled subwavelength plasmonic cavity that overcomes these challenges while offering a tailorable platform for rendering angle and polarization-independent vivid structural colors. Fabricated through large-scale techniques, we produce stand-alone paints ready to be used on any substrate. The platform offers full coloration with a single layer of pigment, surface density of 0.4 g/m2, making it the lightest paint in the world.

Self-assembled plasmonics for angle-independent structural color displays with actively addressed black states.

Nanostructured plasmonic materials can lead to the extremely compact pixels and color filters needed for next-generation displays by interacting with light at fundamentally small length scales. However, previous demonstrations suffer from severe angle sensitivity, lack of saturated color, and absence of black/gray states and/or are impractical to integrate with actively addressed electronics. Here, we report a vivid self-assembled nanostructured system which overcomes these challenges via the multidimensional hybridization of plasmonic resonances. By exploiting the thin-film growth mechanisms of aluminum during ultrahigh vacuum physical vapor deposition, dense arrays of particles are created in near-field proximity to a mirror. The sub-10-nm gaps between adjacent particles and mirror lead to strong multidimensional coupling of localized plasmonic modes, resulting in a singular resonance with negligible angular dispersion and ∼98% absorption of incident light at a desired wavelength. The process is compatible with arbitrarily structured substrates and can produce wafer-scale, diffusive, angle-independent, and flexible plasmonic materials. We then demonstrate the unique capabilities of the strongly coupled plasmonic system via integration with an actively addressed reflective liquid crystal display with control over black states. The hybrid display is readily programmed to display images and video.