title: Tuning the color of silicon nanostructures.
abstract: Empowering silicon (Si) with optical functions constitutes a very important challenge in photonics. The scalable fabrication capabilities for this earth-abundant, environmentally friendly material are unmatched in sophistication and can be unleashed to realize a plethora of high-performance photonic functionalities that find application in information, bio-, display, camouflage, ornamental, and energy technologies. Nanofashioning represents a general strategy to turn Si into a useful optical material and Si structures have already been engineered to enable light emission, optical cloaking, waveguiding, nonlinear optics, enhanced light absorption, and sensing. Here, we demonstrate that a wide spectrum of colors can be generated by harnessing the strong resonant light scattering properties of Si nanostructures under white light illumination. The ability to engineer such colors in a predetermined fashion through a choice of the structure size, dielectric environment, and illumination conditions opens up entirely new applications of Si and puts this material in a new light.
authors.affiliation: Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Linyou
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.forename: Pengyu
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.forename: Edward S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Barnard
authors.forename: Ana M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Mark L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Brongersma