A detailed study of the interaction between fluorescence and nanostructure in naturally evolved photonic systems

生命世界已经产生和使用颜色数亿年了。通过各种形式的进化选择压力，大自然已经发展出许多巧妙的技术和实践，它可以以非常有利的方式控制颜色。我们的研究团队希望向大自然学习;发现其操纵光的独特技术以及产生明亮颜色的专业方法。然后，我们将综合应用这些技术在现代技术中的使用。动物和植物呈现的颜色可以通过几种截然不同的方式产生。我们在生活世界中看到的大多数颜色都是由叶绿素和黑色素等化学色素产生的。这些颜料吸收一些颜色而散射另一些颜色。与这个项目特别相关的是一种特别独特的颜料，据说是荧光的。这种色素通常吸收紫外线，然后强烈地重新发射不同的颜色，可以是蓝色，绿色或红色。在某些情况下，非常小的规则间隔的结构，几毫米宽的百万分之一，可以在不需要任何颜料的情况下产生颜色。这种产生颜色的方式与肥皂泡中产生颜色的方式相同，它依赖于光波与这些微小结构的规则排列相互作用。如果大小合适，它们可以完全控制反射的光的颜色。这种对光的操纵，即使是在三维空间中，如果结构具有正确的形式，也是现代光学技术的一个非常重要的特征，并且在高科技产业的许多不同领域都得到了有效的应用。我们在这次调查中建议进行的项目是非常令人兴奋的，因为它包括对刚刚发现但只有表面记录的东西的详细研究。在这一发现之前，科学界并不知道自然界已经进化出同时使用荧光颜料和纳米结构来产生一种控制其产生的光的发射的系统。在之前的BBSRC资助的工作（发表于2006年11月）中，我们的研究小组发现，一些蝴蝶通过荧光产生彩色光，然后通过使用一种非常小但规则的结构来控制这种光从翅膀发出的方式。这一发现的真正特殊之处在于，这种蝴蝶的系统与技术中发现的一种发光系统非常相似，这是新一代高效发光二极管（LED）之一。换句话说，自然和技术已经融合在非常相似的设计上，似乎优化了光的产生和发射方式。通过这项拟议的研究，我们希望更详细地了解这种和其他荧光天然系统;看看它们的光子设计是否可以用来使合成光学设备更有效。该项目的结果将传达给国际科学界和光子公司。该项目将提供有关蝴蝶、甲虫、蝎子和鸟类等特殊天然鲜艳动物生物学的基本新信息。它还将为技术提供新的思路，以有效的方式控制表面的颜色，并在LED和光导网络等通信应用中操纵光的流动。

The living world has been producing and using colour for hundreds of millions of years. By means of various forms of evolutionary selection pressures, nature has developed many ingenious techniques and practices with which it can control colour in highly advantageous ways. Our research team would like to learn from nature; to discover its unique techniques for manipulating the flow of light and its specialised methods for generating bright colour. We will then synthetically apply these techniques for use in modern technology . The colours displayed by animals and plants can be produced in several distinctly different ways. The majority of colour we see in the living world around us is produced using chemical pigments such as chlorophyll and melanin. These pigments absorb some colours and scatter others. Of special relevance to this project is a particularly distinctive sort of pigment that is said to be fluorescent. This sort of pigment usually absorbs ultra-violet light and then strongly reemits a different colour that can be blue, green or red. In certain cases, very small regularly spaced structures, a few millionths of a millimetre wide, can produce colour without the need for any pigment. This way of producing colour is the same as that which creates the colour in soap bubbles and it relies on light waves interacting with the regular arrangements of these tiny structures. If they are just the right size, they can completely control what colour of light is reflected. This manipulation of light, even in three dimensions if the structure has the right form, is an incredibly important feature of modern optical technology and is usefully employed in many different areas of high-tech industry. The project we propose to undertake in this investigation is exceptionally exciting because it comprises the detailed study of something which has only just been discovered but only superficially documented. Until this discovery, science didn't know that nature has evolved the simultaneous use of fluorescent pigment and nanostructure to produce a system that controls the emission of the light it produces. In previous BBSRC-funded work (published in November 2006), our research group discovered that some butterflies produce coloured light by fluorescence and then control the way in which this light is emitted from their wings by using a specialised form of very small but regular structure. The really exceptional part of this discovery is that this butterfly's system is very similar to a form of light emitting system that is found in technology, one of the new generation of high-efficiency light emitting diodes (LEDs). In other words, nature and technology have converged on very similar designs that appear to optimise the way that light can be produced and emitted. With this proposed study, we want to understand this and other fluorescent natural systems in far greater detail; to see if their photonic designs can be used to make synthetic optical devices much more efficient. The results of the project will be communicated to the international scientific community and to photonics companies. The project will provide fundamental new information about the biology of specialised natural brightly coloured animals such as butterflies, beetles, scorpions and birds. It will also provide new ideas for technology about efficient ways to control the colour of surfaces and to manipulate the flow of light in communication applications such as LEDs and light-guiding networks.