Exotic and vibrant colors naturally occur in nature because of pigmentations. But nature is also capable of displaying a whole spectrum of eye-catching colors through building nano-scale surface structures. Creatures with intricate physical aesthetics, like a peacock’s feathers or the rich patterns on a butterfly’s wings, achieve this kind of high color resolution due to the small-scale arrays of distinctly shaped objects on their surfaces. This naturally occurring color structure was exploited by a team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). They developed a laser printing technique that doesn’t require ink.

Laser printing without ink

A laser printing technique developed by Anders Kristensen and his DTU team is able to produce high-resolution images without fading away and without using any ink. The team constructed a material called metasurface, which consists of 60 nanometers high columns of plastic. The material’s surface is painted with a coating of germanium, of only 35 nanometers in thickness, then semiconductors are placed on top of the pillars or columns.