Abstract
Photonic crystals (PCs) exhibit promising structural coloration properties and possess extensive application prospects in diverse optical fields. However, state-of-the-art inorganic or polymeric PCs show limited adaptivity as their configurations are fixed once formed. Herein, bio-organic adaptive PCs are fabricated via drop-casting of amphiphilic guanine-based peptide nucleic acid self-assembled microspheres. The high formation activation energy of up to 81.8 kJ·mol−1 suggests that the self-assembly step dominates the entire process. Therefore, the configurations along with the structural coloration of the supramolecular PCs are sensitive to self-assembly influencing parameters, showing temperature-encoded structural color evolution and solvent polarity-dependent solvatochromism. Our findings demonstrate that the supramolecular PCs are adaptive, thus showing promising potential for detection of organic solvents of different polarities in a visual and real-time manner for environmental protection or optical applications.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2022YFE0100800) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52175551). The authors thank the members of the laboratories for helpful discussions.
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Zhang, J., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Bio-organic adaptive photonic crystals enable supramolecular solvatochromism. Nano Res. 16, 12092–12097 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5331-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5331-1