A material that can capture changes in environmental stimuli as a color change can be used to develop sensors and displays. By producing an ordered structure in a polymer gel that reflects particular wavelengths of light, we can express the volume change that occurs based on the environment as the change in the wavelength of reflected light, i.e., structural color. To date, many systems have been developed to change the hue of the structural color as a function of temperature, pH, substance, applied force, and so on. However, as is expected from the principle of optical interference, the gel usually shows a red-shift with increasing volume. In this study, we propose a method for preparing structurally colored stimuli-responsive polymer gels that display appropriate color changes according to changes in environmental stimuli. For this purpose, we employ the photonic balls, which are spherical colloidal crystals consisting of monodisperse silica particles, as templates. By combining the wavelength-selective reflection generated from different photonic band gaps of the photonic balls, we succeeded in developing porous stimuli-responsive polymer gels that exhibited various types of color change, which are not observed in conventional systems.
Keywords: photonic ball; photonic band gap; stimuli-responsive gel; structural color; three primary colors of light.