Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Photonic Structures for Coloration
in the Biological World
Jian Zi, Biqin Dong, Tianrong Zhan, and Xiaohan Liu
Abstract
In the biological world the living organisms have exploited photonic
structures to produce striking structural coloration since the Cambrian period.
In recent years, structural colors and associated photonic structures have received
increasing attention from scientists in a wide variety of disciplines ranging from
physics, biology, and chemistry to material science. Revealed natural photonic
structures are diverse, delicate, and multifunctional as well. Natural photonic
structures and their ingenious ways of light steering could be a great source of
inspiration, invaluable to our bio-inspired technologies. In this chapter, we will give
a review on natural photonic structures and their coloration. A historical survey is
given in Sect.
8.2
. In Sect.
8.3
, we discuss the mechanisms of structural coloration,
including interference, diffraction, scattering, or their combination. Experimental
and theoretical methods for studying natural photonic structures are briefly reviewed
in Sect.
8.4
. In Sect.
8.5
, we present some typical photonic structures occurring in
the biological world, such as thin films, multilayers, diffraction gratings, photonic
crystals, and amorphous photonic structures, and also discuss their coloration
mechanisms. An outlook is given in the last section.
8.1
Introduction
In the biological world, the evolution of coloration stems from the fact that light
could be a significant selection pressure for certain life forms. As a result, colors and
also color patterns may have important biological, physical, and even physiological
J. Zi (
) • B. Dong • T. Zhan • X. Liu
Department of Physics, Key Laboratory of Micro and Nano Photonic Structures
(Ministry of Education), and Key Laboratory of Surface Physics,
Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
e-mail:
jzi@fudan.edu.cn
;
dong bq@hotmail.com
;
071019035@fudan.edu.cn
;
liuxh@fudan.edu.cn
