Fabrication of Nearly-Hyperuniform Substrates by Tailored Disorder for Photonic Applications

Disordered optical substrates play a key role in photonic applications. Furthermore, structures of correlated, in particular hyperuniform, disorder are an emerging new class of photonic material enabling new ways of k-space engineering. Yet, there are little to no feasible technologies that allow fabrication of tailored disordered structures to facilitate a tailored optical response. This work reports on a scalable method to fabricate substrates of tailored correlated disorder by self-stabilized colloid deposition. Easy-to-access experimental parameters allow to tune lateral and vertical statistics of the disordered patterns. In addition, a model is presented that allows accurate prediction of mono- as well as polydisperse particle patterns. Correlation of disorder of the prepared patterns is investigated by means of the structure factor and optical measurements.