Engineering designer materials with bird-inspired structural colors using nanoparticle-based supraballs

Originally published by Thamarasee Jeewandara, Phys.org, on April 27, 2023


Effect of monodisperse binary nanoparticle mixture (220nm-diameter melanin and 220nm-diameter silica; melanin, blue spheres; silica, yellow spheres) composition and mixing state on the supraball color reflectance. -- (A) Visualizations of the cross-section of binary mixture supraballs with varying levels of particle mixing in the increasing order from top to bottom and varying relative proportion of silica in the increasing order from left to right. (B) Corresponding structural colors, represented as RGB color panels, of the binary mixture supraballs. Credit: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adf2859

Materials scientists are often bioinspired, and in a new study, bird-inspired by structural colors exhibited by avian species to form non-iridescent nanoparticle assemblies. Such nanoparticle mixtures varying in particle chemistry and size can affect the color produced to identify structure-color relationships and create designer materials with tailored color.

In a new report on Science Advances, Christian M. Heil, and a research team at several international, multidisciplinary research institutes in the U.S., Belgium, and Germany, showed how to reconstruct the assembled structures via small-angle scattering measurements.

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