Replicating single butterfly wing scales with ZrO2 can create building blocks for small complex photonic devices say UK and Chinese scientists.
In this hot paper the team uses individual single wing scales from the tropical butterfly M. didius as bio-templates to synthesis 3D ZrO2 photonic crystals. The optical properties can be tuned by controlling the lattice size during replication. The teams says that the vast number of species of moths and butterflies, each with several different type of wing scale with different morphologies, offer a wide variety of bio-templates to create complicated photonic crystals with desirable properties via this approach.
Read the article for free until 11th November: Yu Chen, Jiajun Gu, Di Zhang, Shenmin Zhu, Huilan Su, Xiaobin Hu, Chuanliang Feng, Wang Zhang, Qinglei Liu and Andrew R. Parker, J. Mater. Chem., 2011, 21, 15237-15243
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