Nanosphere-Aggregation-Induced Reflection and Its Application in Large-Area and High-Precision Panchromatic Inkjet Printing

Artificial structural colors have attracted more and more attention due to their high photostability, low toxicity, and brilliant colors. Inkjet printing of photonic crystals or amorphous photonic structures can realize large-scale structural color patterns, while plasma printing of metals can achieve high-precision color images. However, still no method is available to fabricate structural color patterns on both a large scale and with high precision. Here, nanosphere-aggregation-induced reflection (NAIR) is first theoretically and experimentally demonstrated and vivid full-spectrum structural color can be generated based on NAIR. Dramatically different from photonic crystals, the accumulation of only a few monodisperse dielectric spheres with an appropriate refractive index and diameter can produce bright structural colors, which makes high resolution possible. By introducing commercial inkjet printers, this aggregate structure can be constructed at high speed in a large scale. Importantly, the color mixing is easily performed by simultaneously applying spheres with different sizes, which allow us to sophisticatedly control the generated color. The demonstrated NAIR printing paves the way toward a full-spectrum, large-scale, and high-precision structural color, offering great potential for daily commercial utilization.