Lamellar structure formed from block copolymer for structural color

Abstract

Certain brilliant colors in living species, such as, in plants, animals, insects, fungi, seaweed, and so on, known as structural colors, have attracted tremendous attention from researchers worldwide. Block copolymers are an interesting class of material that has been proven effective in fabricating structural colors due to their capability to self-assemble into structures on the scale of the wavelength of visible light. Lamellar structure is one of these structures. The demand on the high-quality structural colors in large scale application requires the easy modification of commercial block copolymers to obtain structural colors. In this project, a method to easily prepare structural colors is presented. First, an already commercialized block polymer was purchased. Then, the block copolymer is mixed with the small molecule guest to prepare a supramolecular complex solution. By slowly evaporating the solution, these supramolecular complexes can be assembled into a lamellar structure that displays structural color. By changing the ratio of polymer to small molecular guest and using different small molecular guests, polymer films of different colors can be obtained and tuned.