Description: 

Harnessing Nature’s Light Manipulation and Structure Formation Strategies for Dynamic Optical Materials

Mathias Kolle

Investigations of nature’s most fascinating light manipulation strategies can inspire design concepts for synthetic, hierarchically structured, functional optical materials and devices. While soft and fluid matter frequently enables tunable and stimuli-responsive optical characteristics in biological photonic systems, soft and fluid components still represent an underutilized class of materials in the optical engineers’ toolbox. In this seminar, I will present a selection of materials that employ bio-inspired photonic architectures, implemented in soft and fluid materials, with tunable and stimuli-responsive behavior. I will discuss the application of elastic color-tunable photonic fibers in stretchable optomechanical sensors for pressure determination in compressive medical textiles and the design of dynamic optical materials using micro-scale emulsion droplets with controlled internal morphology. In addition, I will argue that insights in the formation of functional biological materials can be beneficial for informing synthetic materials and device fabrication strategies. Taking butterfly scale formation as a specific example, we aspire to understand the role of mechanical phenomena in biological structure formation processes. We hope that our efforts will advance our understanding of the biomechanics underlying structure formation and reveal opportunities for tailoring cellular processes to create custom material structures, adapt cellular principles for synthetic fabrication strategies, and ensure intimate control of hierarchical material structures across all length scales.

Date: 
Friday, September 21, 2018 - 16:00 to 17:00
Event Location: 
3-270