Scalable Reflective Plasmonic Structural Colors from Nanoparticles and Cavity Resonances – the Cyan‐Magenta‐Yellow Approach

Abstract Plasmonic metasurfaces for color generation are emerging as important components for next generation display devices. Fabricating bright plasmonic colors economically and via easily scalable methods, however, remains difficult. Here, the authors demonstrate an efficient and scalable strategy based on colloidal lithography to fabricate silver‐based reflective metal–insulator–nanodisk plasmonic cavities that provide a cyan‐magenta‐yellow (CMY) color palette with high relative luminance. With the same basic structure, they exploit different mechanisms to efficiently produce a complete subtractive color palette. Finite‐difference time‐domain simulations reveal that these mechanisms include gap surface plasmon modes for thin insulators and hybridized modes between disk plasmons and Fabry–Pérot modes for thicker systems. To produce yellow hues, they take advantage of higher‐energy gap surface plasmon modes to allow resonance dips in the blue spectral region for comparably large nanodisks, thereby circumventing difficult fabrication of nanodisks less than 80 nm. It is anticipated that incorporation of these strategies can reduce fabrication constraints, produce bright saturated colors, and expedite large‐scale production.