Patterned Photonic Crystals: Large Scale Silk Inverse Opals with Tunable, Geometrically Defined Structural Color

Summary

Tufts researchers have developed large-scale, macro defect-free, and highly flexible patterned silk inverse opal photonic crystals with tunable, geometrically defined structural color. 

Background

Silk fibroin, collected from the domesticated Bombyx mori (B. mori) silkworm, has been widely investigated for decades as a biomaterial for biomedical applications because of its biocompatibility and biodegradability.  Recently, silk fibroin has also been shown to be a candidate for optical applications due to its excellent combination of transparency, low surface roughness, nanoscale controllability, mechanical durability and water based processing.  These properties enable a variety of fabrication strategies such as hard-template, soft lithography, nanoimprinting, electron-beam lithography, and inkjet printing to be applicable to silk fibroin to fabricate a range of optical and photonic components, including 3D photonic crystals, microlens arrays, microprism arrays, one- and two-dimensional diffraction gratings and waveguides. 

Description

The present invention relates to patterned photonic crystals. These photonic crystals are large scale silk inverse opals with tunable, geometrically defined structural color. Such photonic crystals exhibit structural color or a photonic band gap (“PBG”) and are found to be highly sensitive to water vapor and UV irradiation. Multicolored photonic macro- or micro-patterns have been demonstrated by selectively applying water vapor or UV irradiation through a shadow mask. The present invention also provides methods for making and using the same.

Applications

Environmental sensing/ monitoring

Sports diagnostics/ sensing

Intellectual Property

PCT Publication No. WO2018075125 (April 26, 2018)

US Publication No. 2019-0187331 (June 20, 2019)

Licensing Contact

Martin Son
martin.son@tufts.edu