Abstract

Color appearance and printing are indispensable for identifying and perceiving objects, but products based on chemical colorants such as pigments or dyes have recycling issues. Structural colors, particularly based on plasmonic metasurfaces, offer an attractive alternative; however, plasmonic color pixels have so far been pre-designed and “printed” using e-beam lithography, which creates a challenge in scaling up, maintaining low costs, and customizing products. As a new paradigm, we propose simply to print the final pattern using an ink-free portable laser printer on a generic, mass-producible plasmonic substrate made by nanoimprinting.

© 2016 Optical Society of America