BIO4D

BIO4D Bioinspired composite architectures for responsive 4 dimensional photonics

For more than 500 million years, nature has perfected the harvesting of light and translating colour from natural organisms using dynamic structural colouration. Through these hierarchical periodic structures, which interact with light, animals can efficiently camouflage, signal, mimic, and regulate temperature. Exploiting bioinspiration to recreate this synthetically would develop active encryption technologies, rapid-response chemical and biological sensors, and low-cost gas monitors.

The bioinspired approach of BIO4D exploits materials chemistry to harness dynamic and responsive structural colour, through the development of self-ordering nanoparticles (in place of guanine found in nature), synthesis of responsive materials (mimicking motor proteins and actin filaments), and programmed nanoscale 3D printing (yielding ordered and disordered superstructures). Using this approach, it is possible to generate microscopic optical arrays that can respond to light, heat, vapour, or chemical analytes, to instantly camouflage and encrypt or to sense and diagnose.

Project Start Date: 1st May 2023. This is an ERC Starting grant award with a budget of €1,498,579

AMBER Researcher & Coordinator: AI Colm Delaney, TCD