Biological and biologically inspired photonic materials and devices

Abstract

We discuss the increasing effort to adopt biological and biologically inspired concepts to solve problems in photonic materials and devices. This effort ranges from exploiting fundamental material properties, as in fluorescent dyes and DNA-derived polymers, to studying structures that interact strongly with photons, exemplified by butterfly wings. An emerging area of interest is the combination of biological or biologically derived materials with organic or inorganic synthetic materials to achieve material systems with unprecedented performance. We discuss several examples from our recent work including erbium-doped sol-gel/ DNA-CTMA, diatom photonics, and microring resonator based sensing of biological objects.