The visual appearances of disordered optical metasurfaces

Nanostructured materials have recently emerged as a promising approach for material appearance design. Research has mainly focused on creating structural colours by wave interference, leaving aside other important aspects that constitute the visual appearance of an object, such as the respective weight of specular and diffuse reflectances, object macroscopic shape, illumination and viewing conditions. Here we report the potential of disordered optical metasurfaces to harness visual appearance. We develop a multiscale modelling platform for the predictive rendering of macroscopic objects covered by metasurfaces in realistic settings, and show how nanoscale resonances and mesoscale interferences can be used to spectrally and angularly shape reflected light and thus create unusual visual effects at the macroscale. We validate this property with realistic synthetic images of macroscopic objects and centimetre-scale samples observable with the naked eye. This framework opens new perspectives in many branches of fine and applied visual arts. A multiscale modelling platform combining nanoscale resonant scattering, mesoscale multiple scattering and macroscale light transport effectively predicts the macroscopic visual effects created by optical metamaterials with disordered nanostructures.

Automated summary

“Nanostructured materials have emerged as a promising approach for material appearance design, focusing on creating structural colors by wave interference. However, other important aspects of an object's visual appearance have been neglected. In this study, a multiscale modeling platform was developed to predict the visual effects of macroscopic objects covered by disordered optical metasurfaces. By utilizing nanoscale resonances and mesoscale interferences, unique visual effects were created at the macroscale. This framework opens up new possibilities in fine and applied visual arts.”