Project 82: Design and Application Research of Bio-inspired Stimulus-Response Material

Contact Information:

Research Assistant Yao Li

Project Description and Objectives:

The stimuli-responsive photonic crystals have many potential applications in physical, chemical and biological detections. The colors of the stimuli-responsive photonic crystals, which are a kind of smart color shifting material, can be tuned by external stimuli, such as temperature, pH, ions, or electric fields. When external conditions change, the physical or chemical properties of the materials will change correspondingly, leading to a change of the periodic lengths or the refractive indexes of the photonic crystals, which will eventually cause change to the structural colors of these materials. Thus, the external stimuli signals will transfer into the color change of the photonic crystals, which can be detected by the spectra or directly observed by the naked eye, providing an effective and intuitionistic detection for the stimuli signals.

In nature, many living creatures have shining colors which are related to their photonic structures. This study focuses on the synthesis of the stimuli-responsive photonic crystals by using biomaterials as the templates and investigation of the properties.

Eligibility Requirements:

Experience in material chemical synthetic, material structure characterization and analysis or simulation are preferred.

Main Tasks:

Preparation of stimuli-responsive photonic polymers with hierarchical structures.

Preparation of organic-inorganic muti-stimuli responsive systems with hierarchical structures.

Characterization of stimuli-responsive photonic structures and properties.

Simulation of the photonic structures and responsive mechanism study.

Website:

Lab: http://sklcm.sjtu.edu.cn/

School: http://smse.sjtu.edu.cn