Bioinspired chiral photonic crystals

Abstract

Structural coloration strategies are widely adopted in the living world to manipulate light, offering great inspiration for humans to address the challenges in creating advanced photonic materials with desired performance. Among the vast photonic structures in nature, chiral photonic crystals have drawn special attention owing to their intricate 3D structure, unique chiroptical properties, and potential applications in chiral optics, pigments, information storage, and so on. In this review, we focus on the research progress in clarifying the hierarchical structures and unique optical properties of chiral photonic crystal structures found in animals and plants, including cholesteric-like one-dimensional photonic crystals and chiral gyroid structures. We summarize various top-down and bottom-up methods to mimic the biological strategy to fabricate chiral photonic crystals with comparable or better performances than their bio-counterparts. The emerging applications in sustainable photonic pigments, polarized luminescence and lasers, information storage, chiroptical devices, sensors, and radiative cooling are highlighted. We hope this review will be helpful in the design and fabrication of multifunctional chiral photonic materials inspired by nature.