Structural Coloration of Transmission Light through Self-Aligned and Complementary Plasmonic Nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper introduces complementary plasmonic structures that enable angle-dependent transmission coloration with a single spectral peak, advancing tunable optical filters for multispectral imaging.

Contribution

It presents a novel self-aligned nanostructure design that suppresses undesired spectral peaks, allowing precise control of transmission color with incident angle.

Findings

Single spectral peak shifts from 736 nm to 843 nm with angle change

Effective suppression of undesired spectral peaks

Potential application in compact multispectral imaging

Abstract

Structural coloration of natural surfaces often originates from the change of reflected colors depending on the viewing or illumination angle. Recently, the structural coloration of nanoplasmonic structures have attracted a great deal of attention due to high compactness, robust stability and high color-tunability, as well as high sensitivity to an incident angle. Here we report complementary plasmonic structures (CPS) for transmission structural coloration by tailoring a single spectral peak depending on the incident angle of light. The CPS features self-aligned silver nanohole and nanodisk arrays, supported by dielectric nanopillar arrays of hydrogen silsesquioxane. Unlike conventional hybridized nanostructures of plasmonic nanohole and nanodisk arrays, the nanodisks of CPS effectively attenuate undesired spectral peaks of nanoholes by exploiting an extinction peak of nanodisks, serving as a spectral suppressor. As a result, a single transmission spectral peak becomes red-shifted from 736 nm to 843 nm as the incident angle varies from 0{\deg} to 30{\deg}. This unique configuration provides a new direction for tunable filters that can be utilized for compact multispectral or hyperspectral imaging applications.