Tailoring the optical properties by colloidal systems

In this paper we report on the fabrication and the characterization of colloidal systems considering complementary structures such as ordered systems (opals) and disordered ones, with the goal of highlight the properties of these systems that permit to control the light propagation through interference phenomena. In the specific we will discuss three structures such as: (i) heterostructure colloidal crystals, constituted by multistack layers of colloidal photonic crystals where the superposition of the properties of each single layer permits to develop systems that present multi-frequency stop bands (ii) metallic dielectric structures, where the infiltration of colloidal crystals with metallic nanoparticles permits to modify the optical properties of the common opal systems (iii) disordered structures, based on monosize nanoparticles with no spatial correlation, that exhibit a band-gap-like-effect called also “Mie Resonance” where these structures can be used to study fundamental phenomena in random media.