Dynamic, color-changing surfaces have many applications including but not limited to displays, wearables, and active
camouflage.
Plasmonic nanostructures can fill this role with the advantages of ultra-small pixels,
high reflectivity, and post-fabrication tuning through control of the surrounding media. However, while post-fabrication tuning have yet to cover a full red-green-blue (RGB) color basis set with a single
nanostructure of singular dimensions, the present invention contemplates a novel LC-based apparatus and methods that enable such tuning and demonstrates a
liquid crystal-plasmonic
system that covers the full red / green / blue (RGB) color basis set, as a function only of
voltage. This is accomplished through a surface morphology-induced,
polarization dependent, plasmonic
resonance and a combination of bulk and surface
liquid crystal effects that manifest at different voltages. The resulting LC-plasmonic
system provides an unprecedented color range for a single plasmonic
nanostructure, eliminating the need for the three spatially static sub-pixels of current displays. The
system's compatibility with existing LCD technology is possible by integrating it with a commercially available thin-film-
transistor (TFT) array. The imprinted surface readily interfaces with computers to display images as well as video.