Rapid and Reversible Tuning of Structural Color of a Hydrogel over the Entire Visible Spectrum by Mechanical Stimulation

In this work, we report a rubberlike elastic hydrogel containing microdomains of bilayers periodically stacked into the polymer network that satisfy the Bragg’s law of diffraction. The rubberlike elastic hydrogel has been synthesized by applying double network principle into a viscoelastic hydrogel containing single-domain macroscopic lamellar bilayer. The hydrogel is able to tune the magnificent structural color reversibly over the entire wavelength range of visible spectrum as fast as the uniaxial tensile stretching and compressive deformation are applied and released. Owing to the strength, softness, and rubberlike elastic deformability, the tunable hydrogel can be used extensively to design a new class of soft tactile sensor as an advanced stress sensor that is able to detect a local deformation of a complicated force field.