New 'Squid' Metamaterials Projects Vivid Color Display

Think of a material that can change its color and pattern automatically. Sounds a bit like science fiction, right? But that's exactly what scientists are looking to create with their new color-display technology. Basing their ideas off of squid, which can camouflage themselves automatically with their background, scientists have created new technology which brings them one step closer to creating a new class of materials.

The full-color display technology uses aluminum nanoparticles in order to create the vivid red, blue and green hues found in today's LCD televisions and monitors. The findings come after researchers have studied the amazing camouflage abilities of cephalopods, which include squid, octopus and cuttlefish.

"Our goal is to learn from these amazing animals so that we could create new materials with the same kind of distributed light-sensing and processing abilities that they appear to have in their skins," said Naomi Halas, co-author of the new study, in a news release. "We know cephalopods have some of the same proteins in their skin that we have in our retinas, so part of our challenge, as engineers, is to build a material that can 'see' light the way their skin sees it, and another challenge is designing systems that can react and display vivid camouflage patterns."

 The new technology works by delivering red, blue and green hues from five-micron-square pixels that each contains several hundred aluminum nanorods. By varying the length and the spacing of the rods, the researchers could create pixels that produced dozens of colors.

Currently, the researchers hope to further develop the display technology and eventually combine it with other new technologies in order to eventually develop materials that mimic the abilities of cephalopods.

"We hope to eventually bring all of these technologies together to create a new material that can sense light in full color and react with full-color camouflage displays," said Halas.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.