Design and fabrication of resonant nanoscale color pixels

Nanostructured optical resonators allows colors on surfaces to be controlled precisely by geometric control using advanced nanofabrication tools. With components consisting of metals, and dielectrics, a range of different nanostructure designs have been investigated in its ability to generate colors when white light reflects off the surfaces. For instance, the original structures for plasmonic color printing consists of disks raised above a holey backreflector [1–3]. This design has been demonstrated to be effective on both Si and plastic substrates [4], or with a polymeric overcoat [5]. While this design allows individual nanodisks to support a single color, hole arrays rely on the periodicity to determine the colors, and are more commonly used in transmission color filters [6]. Several new nanostructure designs have recently been investigated, as shown in the schematics in Fig. 1. In this talk, we will discuss the fabrication processes, and optical properties for these structures. We explore also the application of these structures in security prints, second harmonic generation, and photoluminescence enhancement.