Absorbing-coating-assisted laser-induced periodic surface structures on solids

Brilliant iridescent structural color can be realized by micro-/nanostructuring of solid surfaces, but the preparation processes are usually complex and expensive. In the article, a universal, low-cost technique for fabricating absorbing-coating-assisted laser-induced periodic surface structures (ACA-LIPSS) on various types of solids including polymers, dielectrics, semiconductors, and metals, is developed via nanosecond laser irradiation of the ink (Solvent Black 7) coating on a solid surface. Because ink layers on different solid surfaces can be similarly coated manually and removed chemically, the ACA-LIPSS technique with the erasable characteristic can be employed to color both handmade artworks and digital scanning patterns on various solids universally. Moreover, an analytical model based on the standing-wave laser field is proposed to elucidate the different effective refractive indexes of ink layers on different substrates, and thus obtain the corresponding theoretical periods of ACA-LIPSS, which are in good agreement with the experimental ones with error <10%. In short, as a versatile surface micro-/nanostructuring approach, ACA-LIPSS successfully prepared on a variety of solids with high material universality, good durability, and rewritability show great application potentials in artwork creation, encryption, anti-counterfeiting, and deformation sensor.