{"id":111254,"date":"2020-08-13T09:27:03","date_gmt":"2020-08-13T16:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/engineers-manipulate-color-on-the-nanoscale-making-it-disappear"},"modified":"2020-08-13T09:27:03","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T16:27:03","slug":"engineers-manipulate-color-on-the-nanoscale-making-it-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/engineers-manipulate-color-on-the-nanoscale-making-it-disappear","title":{"rendered":"Engineers manipulate color on the nanoscale, making it disappear"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineers-manipulate-color-on-the-nanoscale-making-it-disappear2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most of the time, a material\u2019s color stems from its chemical properties. Different atoms and molecules absorb different wavelengths of light; the remaining wavelengths are the \u201cintrinsic colors\u201d that we perceive when they are reflected back to our eyes.<\/p>\n<p>So-called \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/structural+color\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">structural color<\/a>\u201d works differently; it\u2019s a property of physics, not chemistry. Microscopic patterns on some surfaces reflect light in such a way that different wavelengths collide and interfere with one another. For example, a peacock\u2019s feathers are made of transparent protein fibers that have no intrinsic color themselves, yet we see shifting, iridescent blue, green and purple hues because of the nanoscale structures on their surfaces.<\/p>\n<p>As we become more adept at manipulating structure at the smallest scales, however, these two types of color can combine in even more surprising ways. Penn Engineers have now developed a system of nanoscale semiconductor strips that uses structural color interactions to eliminate the strips\u2019 intrinsic color entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the time, a material\u2019s color stems from its chemical properties. Different atoms and molecules absorb different wavelengths of light; the remaining wavelengths are the \u201cintrinsic colors\u201d that we perceive when they are reflected back to our eyes. So-called \u201cstructural color\u201d works differently; it\u2019s a property of physics, not chemistry. Microscopic patterns on some [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}