Ultrahighly Saturated Structural Colors Enhanced by Multipolar-Modulated Metasurfaces

Nano Lett. 2019 Jul 10;19(7):4221-4228. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b04923. Epub 2019 Feb 13.

Abstract

Colors with high saturation are of prime significance for display and imaging devices. So far, structural colors arising from all-dielectric metasurfaces, particularly amorphous silicon and titanium oxide, have exceeded the gamut of standard RGB (sRGB) space. However, the excitation of higher-order modes for dielectric materials hinders the further increase of saturation. Here, to address the challenge, we propose a new design strategy of multipolar-modulated metasurfaces with multi-dielectric stacked layers to realize the deep modulation of multipolar modes. Index matching between layers can suppress the multipolar modes at nonresonant wavelength, resulting in the dramatic enhancement in the monochromaticity of reflection spectra. Ultrahigh-saturation colors ranging from 70% to 90% with full hue have been theoretically and experimentally obtained. The huge gamut space can be realized in an unprecedented way, taking up 171% sRGB space, 127% Adobe RGB space, and 57% CIE space. More interestingly, the coverage for Recommendation 2020 (Rec. 2020) space, which almost has not been successfully realized so far, can reach 90%. We anticipate that the proposed multipolar-modulated metasurfaces are promising for the enlargement of the color range for high-end and advanced display applications.

Keywords: Adobe RGB space; Multi-dielectric metasurface; deep modulation; structural colors; ultrahigh saturation.