Dynamic Color Displays Using Stepwise Cavity Resonators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dynamic color display technology using magnesium-based pixelated Fabry-Perot cavities that can switch colors through hydrogenation, enabling applications in printing, sensing, and security.

Contribution

The work presents a new dynamic color printing scheme with magnesium nanostructures that can switch states via hydrogenation, allowing for encrypted images and color transformations.

Findings

Demonstrated hydrogen-controlled color switching in pixelated cavities

Created dynamic encrypted images readable only with hydrogen

Achieved tunable black/white and color printing with fine tonal control

Abstract

High-resolution multicolor printing based on pixelated optical nanostructures is of great importance for promoting advances in color display science. So far, most of the work in this field has been focused on achieving static colors, limiting many potential applications. This inevitably calls for the development of dynamic color displays with advanced and innovative functionalities. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel dynamic color printing scheme using magnesium-based pixelated Fabry-Perot cavities by grey-scale nanolithography. With controlled hydrogenation and dehydrogenation, magnesium undergoes unique metal and dielectric transitions, enabling distinct blank and color states from the pixelated Fabry-Perot resonators. Following such a scheme, we first demonstrate dynamic Ishihara plates, in which the encrypted images can only be read out using hydrogen as information decoding key. We also demonstrate a new type of dynamic color generation, which enables fascinating transformations between black/white printing and color printing with fine tonal tuning. Our work will find wide-ranging applications in full-color printing and displays, colorimetric sensing, information encryption and anti-counterfeiting.