Soft spheres yield photonic structures
From New York City, at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society
A novel method for creating light-manipulating patterns inside photonic crystals–materials that transmit and reflect specific wavelengths of light–could hasten the arrival of a new generation of faster, all-optical telecommunications technologies.
Instead of building photonic crystals out of hard materials such as silica, Andrew Lyon and his colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta used hydrogel nanoparticles–water-saturated polymer spheres that swell and contract in response to temperature. Roughly the size of large viruses, the spheres measure, on average, 224 nanometers in diameter. The researchers mixed the spheres with even smaller, gold nanoparticles. A heating-and-cooling treatment prompted the spheres to self-assemble into crystal structures with the gold particles between them.