UV-Responsive, wide color gamut, inkless dynamic photonic paper enabled by disulfide-containing polyurethane based Fabry-Perot resonant cavity

Abstract

Photonic paper with dynamically tunable color has been widely investigated due to its excellent ability to change its optical patterns under external variation. Herein, a UV-responsive metal–insulator–metal (MIM) Fabry-Perot cavity is proposed to prepare dynamic photonic paper through introducing disulfide bonds containing polyurethane as an insulating layer. The as-prepared MIM cavity based photonic paper shows dynamically tunable color variation in almost the whole visible gamut under different UV-irradiation durations. In addition, by simply adjusting the UV-irradiation duration at each point with the aid of a photomask, multicolor patterns could be “written” onto the as-prepared MIM photonic paper. What's more, thanks to the dynamic feature of the disulfide bond, the color patterns on the photonic paper could also be “erased” by thermal treatment, making the photonic paper “rewritable”. Together with all these features, the proposed UV-responsive MIM photonic paper would exhibit great potential for application in information anticounterfeiting, dynamic color display devices and environment-friendly inkless color printing.