New chameleon-like material
8 Apr 2015 by Evoluted New Media
Engineers have created a chameleon-like material that can change colour on demand.
By using flexible, high-contrast metastructure, scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have created an incredibly thin membrane that can change colour when bent.
“This is the first time anybody has made a flexible chameleon-like skin that can change colour simply by flexing it. I think it's extremely cool,” said Professor Connie Chang-Hasnain at the University of California.
In the study, published in the journal Optica, the researchers etched rows of ridges onto a silicon film one thousand times thinner than a human hair.They were able to ‘tune’ these rows so that a specific wavelength of light was reflected from the surface.
“If you have a surface with very precise structures, spaced so they can interact with a specific wavelength of light, you can change its properties and how it interacts with light by changing its dimensions,” said Professor Chang-Hasnain.
The new material is incredibly thin, perfectly flat, and easy to manufacture with desired surface properties. The researchers believe that it can offer possibilities for a new class of display technologies, colour-shifting camouflage.
“The next step is to make this larger-scale and there are facilities already that could do so. At that point, we hope to be able to find applications in entertainment, security, and monitoring,” said Professor Chang-Hasnain.
Paper: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-2-3-255
