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Phoenix666 writes:

A peacock's bright teal and brilliant blue feathers are not the result of pigments but rather nanoscale networks that reflect specific wavelengths of light. This so-called structural coloration has long interested researchers and engineers because of its durability and potential for application in solar arrays, biomimetic tissues and adaptive camouflage. But today's techniques to integrate structural color into materials are time-consuming and costly.

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, have developed a new, more robust and cost effective system to build large-scale metamaterials with structural color. The research is described in the journal Nature Light: Science and Applications.

[...]Unlike a peacock's ordered array of nanostructures, contingas get their vibrant hues from a disordered and porous nanonetwork of keratin that looks like a sponge or piece of coral. When light strikes the feather, the porous keratin pattern causes red and yellow wavelengths to cancel each other out, while blue wavelengths of light amplify one another.

"Usually, we associate the idea of disorder with the notion that something is uncontrollable," said Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior of author of the paper. "Here disorder can be put to our advantage and used as a design parameter to create a new class of metamaterials with a wide range of funcitionalities and applications"

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