Liquid crystal-powered Mie resonators for electrically tunable photorealistic color gradients and dark blacks

Abstract

Taking inspiration from beautiful colors in nature, structural colors produced from nanostructured metasurfaces have shown great promise as a platform for bright, highly saturated, and high-resolution colors. Both plasmonic and dielectric materials have been employed to produce static colors that fulfil the required criteria for high-performance color printing, however, for practical applications in dynamic situations, a form of tunability is desirable. Combinations of the additive color palette of red, green, and blue enable the expression of further colors beyond the three primary colors, while the simultaneous intensity modulation allows access to the full color gamut. Here, we demonstrate an electrically tunable metasurface that can represent saturated red, green, and blue pixels that can be dynamically and continuously controlled between on and off states using liquid crystals. We use this to experimentally realize ultrahigh-resolution color printing, active multicolor cryptographic applications, and tunable pixels toward high-performance full-color reflective displays.

Abstract

Ellipsoidal-shaped Mie resonators are integrated with a liquid crystal cell to demonstrate electrically tunable reflective structural color metasurfaces that can be modulated continuously from bright spectral colors to dark blacks.