Pretreated Butterfly Wings for Tuning the Selective Vapor Sensing.
Photonic nanoarchitectures occurring in the scales of Blue butterflies are responsible for their vivid blue wing coloration. These nanoarchitectures are quasi-ordered nanocomposites which are constituted from a chitin matrix with embedded air holes. Therefore, they can act as chemically selective sensors due to their color changes when mixing volatile vapors in the surrounding atmosphere which condensate into the nanoarchitecture through capillary condensation. Using a home-built vapor-mixing setup, the spectral changes caused by the different air + vapor mixtures were efficiently characterized. It was found that the spectral shift is vapor-specific and proportional with the vapor concentration. We showed that the conformal modification of the scale surface by atomic layer deposition and by ethanol pretreatment can significantly alter the optical response and chemical selectivity, which points the way to the efficient production of sensor arrays based on the knowledge obtained through the investigation of modified butterfly wings.
Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, H-1525 Budapest, P.O. Box 49, Hungary. piszter@mfa.kfki.hu.
Gábor
G
Piszter
Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, H-1525 Budapest, P.O. Box 49, Hungary. kertesz@mfa.kfki.hu.
Krisztián
K
Kertész
Hungarian Natural History Museum, H-1088 Budapest, Baross utca 13, Hungary. balint@nhmus.hu.
Zsolt
Z
Bálint
Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, H-1525 Budapest, P.O. Box 49, Hungary. biro@mfa.kfki.hu.
László Péter
LP
Biró
D000818:Animals; D002080:Butterflies / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D010858:Pigmentation; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D014835:Volatilization; D014921:Wings, Animal / Q000033:anatomy & histology*
atomic layer deposition; biomaterial; butterfly wing; optical spectroscopy; photonic crystal; vapor sensing