Laser nanoprinting of floating three-dimensional plasmonic color in pH-responsive hydrogel

Recent demonstrations of metasurfaces present their great potential to implement flat and multifunctional optical elements, which are accomplished with the designs of planar optics and micro-/nano- fabrications. Integrating metasurfaces in three dimensions has manifested drastically increasing advantages in manipulating light fields by extending design freedom. However, fabricating three-dimensional metasurfaces remain a tough challenge due to the lack of stereo printing protocols. Herein, we demonstrate laser nanoprinting of floated silver nanoparticle array in transparent hydrogel films for 3D metasurface to achieve color patterning. It is found that spatially resolved nanoparticles can be produced through laser induced photoreduction of silver ions and robustly anchored to the gel backbones by a focused femtosecond laser beam within a pH-responsive smart hydrogel matrix. With the aid of expansion properties of the pH-responsive hydrogel, repetitive coloration of the patterned plasmonic nanoparticle array over a wide spectrum range is achieved via reversible regulation of nanoparticle spacing from 550 to 350 nm and vice versa. This approach allows broadband 3D color-regulation in nanoscale for applications in active spectral filtering, information encryption, security tagging and biological colorimetric sensing, etc.