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Eternal paint based on plasmonic pixels

04.06.2016

A team of researchers from the University of Melbourne has developed a paint made from metal nanoparticles - plasmonic pixels - that will never fade in the sun.

A plasmonic pixel is a very small piece of metal. There are many very mobile electrons in any metal, and when light acts on a metal nanoparticle, the photon energy slightly shifts the electrons away from their nuclei, creating negative and positive poles for a short time. The forces of Coulomb attraction bring the electrons back into place. This process is repeated countless times and is called plasmon resonance. It causes the nanoparticles (and the material made from them) to absorb electromagnetic waves with certain characteristics - due to this, the material from the plasmonic pixels acquires a color visible to the eye.

The use of plasmonic pixels as a coloring agent has so far encountered a number of difficulties - in particular, the number of colors available was limited, and there was also no way to give a pixel a permanent specific color.

The new plasmonic pixel format allows you to create more than 2000 colors and shades. Scientists used tiny antennas made of aluminum: the distance between them determines the saturation of the color, and the hue is determined by the length of the antenna. With the size, too, everything is getting better: we managed to make a picture with a size of 1,5 x 1,5 cm - this is much more than similar techniques allowed before. And the resolution of the image is so high that the human eye cannot see the distance between the pixels.

Eternal paint based on plasmonic pixels can be used to paint cars, buildings and other large surfaces.

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Experiments with this material showed that it can withstand tensile loads 11,5 times greater than untreated samples of the original wood. In fact, this figure is comparable to the properties of good steel, while "ultra-compact wood" remains much lighter than it. But the demonstration of its "bulletproof" characteristics was especially effective. The video shows that a projectile moving at a speed of 30 m / s easily pierces ordinary wood, but is delayed by a layer of "ultra-compact wood" of the same thickness.

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