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Collagen-Electrohydrodynamic Hierarchical Lithography for Biomimetic Photonic Micro-Nanomaterials.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Repository DOI


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Authors

McCarthy, Emma 
Thomas, Jarrod 
Oppenheimer, Roni 
Rickard, Jonathan JS 

Abstract

Biologically engineered nanomaterials give rise to unique and intriguing properties, which are not available in nature. The full-realization of such has been hindered by the lack of robust and straightforward techniques to produce the required architectures. Here a new bottomup bionano-engineering route is developed to construct nanomaterials using a guided assembly of collagen building blocks, establishing a lithographic process for three-dimensional collagen-based hierarchical micronano-architectures. By introducing optimized hybrid electro-hydrodynamic micronano-lithography exploiting collagen molecules as biological building blocks to self-assemble into a complex variety of structures, quasi-ordered mimics of metamaterials-like are constructed. The tailor-designed engineered apparatus generates the underlying substrates with vertical orientation of collagen at controlled speeds. Templating these hierarchical structures into inorganic materials allows the replication of their network into periodic metal micronano-assemblies. These generate substrates with interesting optical properties, suggesting that size-and-orientation dependent nanofilaments with varying degree of lateral order yield distinctly coloured structures with characteristic optical spectra correlated with observed colours, which varying diameters and interspacing, are attributable to coherent scattering by different periodicity of each fibrous micronano-structure. The artificial mimics display similar optical characteristics to the natural butterfly wing's structure, known to exhibit extraordinary electromagnetic properties, driving future applications in cloaking, super-lenses, photovoltaics and photodetectors.

Description

Publication status: Published

Keywords

biomimetics, collagen patterning, electrohydrodynamic hierarchical lithography, photonic micro‐nanomaterials

Journal Title

Small

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1613-6810
1613-6829

Volume Title

Publisher

Wiley
Sponsorship
European Research Council (EP/Y030206/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/V029983/1, EP/L016346/1)
Wellcome Trust (174ISSFPP)