Synthetic Squid Skin that can 'See' Colors

Thanks to a new full-color display technology, scientists are now one step closer to creating artificial "squid skin" - camouflaging metamaterials that can "see" colors and automatically blend into the background.

Using aluminum nanoparticles, a team from Rice University was able to create the vivid red, blue and green hues. The breakthrough in color-display technology is the latest in the recent discoveries by researchers trying to develop materials that mimic the camouflage properties of 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," co-author Naomi Halas, of Rice University's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP), said in a statement.

According to Halas, humans actually possess some of the same proteins found in the skin of such cephalopods in our retinas. So, their goal is to manufacture a material that can "see" light the same way their skin does.

"Another challenge is designing systems that can react and display vivid camouflage patterns," Halas added.

Bright red, blue, and green hues are delivered by color display technology from five-micron-square pixels, which each have hundreds of aluminum nanorods.

By varying the length and spacing between these aluminum nanorods, researchers Stephan Link and Jana Olson have created pixels that produce these vivid colors that are comparable to those found in high-definition LCD displays.

Until now, the tones produced by plasmonic aluminum nanorods have been muted and washed out, said associate professor of chemistry at Rice University, Stephan Link. The main development in the study was to place the nanorods in an ordered array, he added.

This setup has allowed researchers to fine tune the pixel's color by varying length of the nanorods and by adjusting the space between them.

"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," Halas said.

The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.