Engineers manipulate color on the nanoscale, making it disappear

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation)

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a system of nanoscale semiconductor strips that uses structural color interactions to eliminate the strips' intrinsic color entirely. Structural color comes from the interaction of light with microstructures or nanostructures on some surfaces, while intrinsic color comes from light reflected by some materials. Fine-tuning such a system has implications for holographic displays and optical sensors.