Laser Printing of Translucent Plasmonic Full-Color Images with Transmission-Scattering Dichroism of Silver Nanoparticles

Although the drawing of plasmonic images attracts attention, both top-down lithographic methods and bottom-up laser ablation methods require expensive equipment. In the present work, a cost-effective laser printing method was developed. Fine bright-field translucent full-color images are drawn simply by scanning a thin silver film deposited on a glass plate with an infrared fiber laser. The silver nanoparticles generated by laser dewetting are shaped and their plasmonic colors are tuned by selecting the appropriate laser power during the scanning. The drawn translucent color images show transmission-scattering dichroism of the silver nanoparticles (i.e., Lycurgus cup effect), which gives high designability and an approach to security printing.