The cross-disciplinary research team from NUS and SUTD are trying to better understand how exactly (structurally, optically and developmentally) nature produces and tunes photonic or structural color producing nanostructures, in almost all cases these are self-assembled at the visible optical length scale, that we cannot achieve easily using synthetic materials and they provide a nice template for biomimicry. We are taking apart the hierarchical structure of a butterfly scale layer by layer and seeing how each layer contributes to the colour so that we can mimic the same with metamaterials later.
The team’s also been innovating nanoscale 3D printing (e.g., such as those found in butterflies) followed by heat-shrinking. Some of their research is available here, here and here.
Lead Investigators & Collaborators: Professor Antonio Monteiro, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore. Related research here.
Dr Vinod Saranathan, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore.
Dr Joel Yang – Associate Professor, Materials Science, Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology & Design.
Dr. Javier G. Fernandez, (Assistant Professor, Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design.
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