Versatile full-colour nanopainting enabled by a pixelated plasmonic metasurface

The growing interest to develop modern digital displays and colour printing has driven the advancement of colouration technologies with remarkable speed. In particular, metasurface-based structural colouration shows a remarkable high colour saturation, wide gamut palette, chiaroscuro presentation and polarization tunability. However, previous approaches cannot simultaneously achieve all these features. Here, we design and experimentally demonstrate a surface-relief plasmonic metasurface consisting of shallow nanoapertures that enable the independent manipulation of colour hue, saturation and brightness by individually varying the geometric dimensions and orientation of the nanoapertures. We fabricate microscale artworks using a reusable template-stripping technique that features photorealistic and stereoscopic impressions. In addition, through the meticulous arrangement of differently oriented nanoapertures, kaleidoscopic information states can be decrypted by particular combinations of incident and reflected polarized light.

Automated summary

The development of modern digital displays and colour printing has driven the rapid advancement of colouration technologies. Metasurface-based structural colouration shows high colour saturation, wide gamut palette, chiaroscuro presentation and polarization tunability. However, previous approaches cannot simultaneously achieve all these features. In this study, we demonstrate a surface-relief plasmonic metasurface that allows independent control of colour hue, saturation and brightness through variations in the geometric dimensions and orientation of shallow nanoapertures. Microscale artworks with photorealistic and stereoscopic impressions are fabricated using a reusable template-stripping technique. Furthermore, different combinations of incident and reflected polarized light can decode kaleidoscopic information states.