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Versatile full-colour nanopainting enabled by a pixelated plasmonic metasurface

Nature Nanotechnology volume 18, pages 71–78 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The growing interest to develop modern digital displays and colour printing has driven the advancement of colouration technologies with remarkable speed. In particular, metasurface-based structural colouration shows a remarkable high colour saturation, wide gamut palette, chiaroscuro presentation and polarization tunability. However, previous approaches cannot simultaneously achieve all these features. Here, we design and experimentally demonstrate a surface-relief plasmonic metasurface consisting of shallow nanoapertures that enable the independent manipulation of colour hue, saturation and brightness by individually varying the geometric dimensions and orientation of the nanoapertures. We fabricate microscale artworks using a reusable template-stripping technique that features photorealistic and stereoscopic impressions. In addition, through the meticulous arrangement of differently oriented nanoapertures, kaleidoscopic information states can be decrypted by particular combinations of incident and reflected polarized light.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the surface-relief silver metasurface.
Fig. 2: Experimental colour hues of the metasurface and theoretical fundamentals.
Fig. 3: Plasmonic sketch with continuous colour brightness tuning.
Fig. 4: Photorealistic plasmonic full-colour nanopainting.
Fig. 5: Experimental proof-of-concept for the steganography technique.

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Data availability

The authors declare that data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its Supplementary Information files. All the relevant data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2017YFA0303700 to Y.L. and T.X.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (62005117 to M.S.), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20220068 to T.X. and BK20212004 to Y.L.) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (to T.X.).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Maowen Song, Lei Feng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid-State Microstructures and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Maowen Song, Lei Feng, Pengcheng Huo, Mingze Liu, Chunyu Huang, Feng Yan, Yan-qing Lu & Ting Xu

  2. Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Optical Sensing and Manipulation, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Maowen Song, Lei Feng, Pengcheng Huo, Mingze Liu, Yan-qing Lu & Ting Xu

  3. School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Feng Yan

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  1. Maowen Song
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Contributions

M.S. and T.X. conceived the idea. M.S. performed all the numerical simulations and imaging experiments. L.F. fabricated all the samples. P.H., M.L. and C.H. provided help with the fabrication and experiments. F.Y., Y.L. and T.X. supervised the project. All the authors discussed results and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yan-qing Lu or Ting Xu.

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Nature Nanotechnology thanks Jay Guo, Joel Yang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary discussion, Figs. 1–11 and Supplementary Table 1.

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Song, M., Feng, L., Huo, P. et al. Versatile full-colour nanopainting enabled by a pixelated plasmonic metasurface. Nat. Nanotechnol. 18, 71–78 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01256-4

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