Enhanced Light Absorption in All‐Polymer Biomimetic Photonic Structures by Near‐Zero‐Index Organic Matter

Natural photosynthetic photonic nanostructures can show sophisticated light–matter interactions including enhanced light absorption by slow light even for highly pigmented systems. Beyond fundamental biology aspects, these natural nanostructures are very attractive as blueprints for advanced photoni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advanced functional materials 2022-05, Vol.32 (21), p.n/a
Main Authors: Castillo, Miguel A., Estévez‐Varela, C., Wardley, William P., Serna, R., Pastoriza‐Santos, I., Núñez‐Sánchez, S., Lopez‐Garcia, Martin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomimetics
Broadband
Electromagnetic absorption
excitonics
J‐aggregates
Materials science
Multilayers
Nanostructure
Optical properties
Organic materials
Organic matter
Photoluminescence
photonic crystals
Photonics
Photosynthesis
Polymers
Refractivity
slow light
Thin films
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Summary:Natural photosynthetic photonic nanostructures can show sophisticated light–matter interactions including enhanced light absorption by slow light even for highly pigmented systems. Beyond fundamental biology aspects, these natural nanostructures are very attractive as blueprints for advanced photonic devices. But the soft‐matter biomimetic implementations of such nanostructures is challenging due to the low refractive index contrast of most organic photonic structures. Excitonic organic materials with near‐zero index (NZI) optical properties allow overcoming these bottlenecks. Here, it is demonstrated that the combination of NZI thin films with photonic multilayers like the ones found in nature enables broadband tunable strong reflectance as well as slow light absorption enhancement and tailored photoluminescence properties in the full VIS spectrum. Moreover, it is shown that this complex optical response is tunable, paving the way toward the development of active devices based on all‐polymer and near‐zero index materials photonic structures. This work demonstrates light absorption enhancement by slow light using a fully organic photonic structure by doping some layers with a J‐aggregate dye. This dye creates new photonic bandgaps with increased strength. The structure is considered a biomimetic of a natural photonic structure, consolidating the hypothesis of the use of photonics by nature to enhance light capture.
ISSN:1616-301X
1616-3028
DOI:10.1002/adfm.202113039