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Tuning the Color of Silicon Nanostructures

2010; American Chemical Society; Volume: 10; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/nl1013794

1530-6992

Linyou Cao, Pengyu Fan, Edward S. Barnard, Ana M. Brown, Mark L. Brongersma,

Photonic Crystals and Applications

Empowering silicon (Si) with optical functions constitutes a very important challenge in photonics. The scalable fabrication capabilities for this earth-abundant, environmentally friendly material are unmatched in sophistication and can be unleashed to realize a plethora of high-performance photonic functionalities that find application in information, bio-, display, camouflage, ornamental, and energy technologies. Nanofashioning represents a general strategy to turn Si into a useful optical material and Si structures have already been engineered to enable light emission, optical cloaking, waveguiding, nonlinear optics, enhanced light absorption, and sensing. Here, we demonstrate that a wide spectrum of colors can be generated by harnessing the strong resonant light scattering properties of Si nanostructures under white light illumination. The ability to engineer such colors in a predetermined fashion through a choice of the structure size, dielectric environment, and illumination conditions opens up entirely new applications of Si and puts this material in a new light.