A full gamut of colors in all-dielectric, cheap, and large-scale artificial butterfly wings

Most approaches to making artificial structural colors rely on low-throughput fabrication techniques, use expensive noble metal materials, and are limited to microscopic footprints. To address these limitations, an international team of researchers has demonstrated high-throughput fabrication of all-dielectric mesoporous materials with macroscopic footprints and colorimetric signatures spanning the whole gamut of visible colors. Inspired by the butterfly wing coloration, the researchers completely avoided the use of noble metals, and instead realized structural colors in cheap and abundant dielectric materials, which are completely transparent in the bulk form.