Ascendant bioinspired antireflective materials: Opportunities and challenges coexist

In the past decades, antireflective (AR) materials have drawn more and more attention owing to its promising and wide applications such as photovoltaic industry, optical devices, and flexible display. However, there are also some critical challenges remaining. Fortunately, natural creatures have exhibited diversified well-organized micro/nanostructures and near-perfect functional materials, which provide design principles for development of the bioinspired materials. In terms of the advantages of biological strategies, the ascendant bioinspired AR materials with micro/nanostructure arrays have been developing rapidly, which can effectively suppress light reflection and improve light transmittance as well as absorption, determining the performances of related optical devices. This review highlights recent advances of the bioinspired AR materials. Firstly, the fundamental principles of achieving antireflection are briefly addressed. Next, some typical organisms with sophisticated AR nanostructures are described in detail. After that, recent progress in the optimized design and large area manufacturing is emphasized. Afterwards, the optical performance of the bioinspired AR materials with distinct pattern arrays are reviewed with particular emphasis on bioinspired nanostructure arrays. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of these manufacturing techniques as well as their limitations are also analyzed in depth. Then, the practical applications and its potential value of micro/nanostructure arrays based AR materials in solar cells, light-emitting diodes and organic light-emitting diodes, flexible mobile display devices, infrared stealthy camouflage, agricultural greenhouse, as well as display components of transportation means are briefly discussed. Finally, the remaining grand challenges and future development trend of the ascendant bioinspired AR materials are also presented: opportunities and challenges coexist.