Materials chemistry

Abstract

Active photonic crystals (PC) or photonic crystal heterostructures have many applications such as chemical and biological sensor, active colour displays, structural colour printing and fluorescence enhancement. However, the photonic crystal structures with different functions mentioned above needed different preparation methods, some of them even required sophisticated instruments for specific production processes. Thus, development of a simple way or a useful platform for conveniently fabricating the specific photonic crystal structures with different functions is highly desirable and significant. Herein, by exploiting the self-polymerization of dopamine, we successfully introduced polydopamine (PDA) into silica opaline template and produced PDA photonic crystal structures. Based on the utilization of the unique properties of PDA such as reactivity, reductive ability, powerful adhesive capability as well as carbonizable feature, the PDA based photonic crystal structures provide a very useful platform for further conveniently fabricating multifunctional photonic crystal structures with a variety of potential applications. Due to the virtually unlimited variety provided by the active secondary reaction of PDA, the post-modification of PDA-based photonic crystals can easily afford photonic crystals based chemical or biological sensors. The reductive as well as adhesive ability of PDA provides another tremendous opportunity to produce photonic crystal heterostructures with various metals, metal oxides, polymer or semiconductors nanoparticles. As demonstration, PDA/Ag/PDA and PDA/Pt/PDA opaline structures were prepared by PDA-assisted metallization or adsorption, respectively, which could find promising application in fluorescence enhancement of organic dyes. More importantly, the carbonizable feature of PDA allows for efficiently producing carbon inverse opaline film as well as metal particle doped carbon inverse opaline films by carbonizing the corresponding PDA, PDA/Ag/PDA or PDA/Pt/PDA photonic structures, which could hold various potential applications in catalysis and energy conversion.