Monodisperse Clay Microballs For Tuning The Pseudogaps By Adsorption In Amorphous Photonic Structures

Structural color based on colloidal amorphous arrays has received growing interest in both natural and artificial systems; however few local structures on colloidal particles have been designed to tune the photonic pseudogap. We use an expandable interlayered inorganic nanosheet, a synthetic clay, on monodisperse colloidal silica spheres as constituents in an array. Interlayer expansion of the inorganic nanosheet by a cationic surfactant led to an increase in the size of the colloidal particles, resulting in a spectral redshift of the pseudogap. This phenomenon was related to the change in size of the monodisperse particles, which was induced by changing the defined layered local structure.