Tuesday 12 December 2006

Physicists sing the blues

Physicists have found a way to replicate the microscopic structures that produce structural colours in a Morpho butterfly. They coat a wing with aluminium and then burn away the original.
"We can never come close to the richness of the structures that nature can make," said Zhong Lin Wang, Regents' Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "We want to utilize biology as a template for making new material and new structures. This process gives us a new way to fabricate photonic structures such as waveguides."

Read the whole story at Science Daily.