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Colours at the nanoscale

Printable stained glass

Nature Nanotechnology volume 7, pages 550–551 (2012)Cite this article

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Silver disk-over-hole nanostructures create bright colours and fine tonal variations with the best possible resolution for visible light.

Brilliant shades of red, yellow and green have graced the stained glass windows of cathedrals and medieval pottery for hundreds of years. These colours arise when light excites plasmons — a localized ensemble of conduction electrons — on the surface of noble metal nanoparticles present in the glass or clay matrix1,2. Subtle colour variations are not possible, however, because the metal nanoparticles are of different sizes and are randomly distributed. More recently, nanopatterned silver films have been used to obtain colours that depend on the shape of the nanoholes and the periodicity of grooves surrounding them3. Now, writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Joel K. W. Yang and co-workers at A*STAR in Singapore report how to achieve a broad colour palette — with very fine control over tone — using hybrid nanostructures consisting of an array of silver nanodisks sitting above individual nanohole reflectors at deep-subwavelength spacings4. The resolution is such that all the details and shading of a micrometre-size version of the famous Lena image are rendered with flying colours. (The Lena image is widely used to evaluate image processing algorithms because it contains a large combination of detail, colour variations and shading5.)

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Figure 1: The disk-over-hole nanoarchitecture and the range of colours that can be produced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Teri W. Odom is in the Department of Chemistry, and Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA,

    Teri W. Odom

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  1. Teri W. Odom
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Correspondence to Teri W. Odom.

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Odom, T. Printable stained glass. Nature Nanotech 7, 550–551 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2012.135

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