Electrically Responsive Photonic Crystals with Enhanced Suspension Stability and Color Saturation for Electrophoretic Displays and Smart Windows

Electrophoretic displays (EPDs) based on photonic crystals show great potential due to their reduced eye fatigue and low power consumption. However, the current image quality and service life of this system still face great challenges. In this work, we fabricated a new kind of electrically responsive photonic crystal (ERPC) device based on PSMA@SiO 2 liquid colloidal crystals (LCCs) for EPDs. By introduction of the PSMA core with lower density and higher refractive index, the suspension stability and color saturation of PSMA@SiO 2 LCCs were greatly enhanced compared with those of bare SiO 2 LCCs. The PSMA@SiO 2 LCCs showed brilliant colors, wide color tuning range (∼200 nm), and good reversibility under low voltages (<4 V). Interestingly, the transparency of PSMA@SiO 2 LCCs could also be obviously regulated by an electric field, which was different from the traditional ways that change the thickness of PCs or contrast of refractive index (Δ n ) between the nanospheres and matrix. This transparency modulation offered a novel idea for the transmittance control of smart windows. As a proof of concept, we fabricated a new type of patterned ERPC device to demonstrate their potential in electrophoretic displays and smart windows with controllable transmittance under an electric field.