IMX Talks - From nonlinear photonic crystals to biomimetic structural color

Have you ever marveled at the breathtaking blue of a morpho butterfly's wings? This brilliant color is the result of structural color, a phenomenon that, unlike pigment colors, never fades and is even preserved in fossils. Its physical principle is the photonic crystal, which manipulates light through a periodic arrangement of materials (different dielectric constants).
Learn how nature constructs these intricate three-dimensional photonic crystals and explore our research into recreating these vibrant colors with biological building blocks. I will also tell you about our exciting progress in creating nonlinear (second-harmonic generation) photonic crystals by infiltrating beetle scales with nonlinear sol-gel materials.
Join me on the journey to develop sustainable, brilliant, and biodegradable photonic pigments and the development of three-dimensional nonlinear photonic crystals towards entangled photon generation.

Bio: Viola Vogler-Neuling is a group leader in Prof. Steiner's Soft Matter Physics Group at the University of Fribourg. She is leading the bioinspired photonics subgroup. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from ETH Zurich in 2022. Dr. Vogler-Neuling is a world-leading expert in the bottom-up nanofabrication of second-harmonic photonic crystals and metasurfaces. Driven by how nature can self-assemble highly complex three-dimensional photonic crystals, Dr. Vogler-Neuling’s subgroup is developing biomimetic structural color from natural building blocks. Dr. Vogler-Neuling has recently received an SNSF Spark grant and an NCCR Bioinspired Materials Independence Grant to create photonic crystals from lipidic lyotropic liquid crystals and to analyze the molecular building blocks that give rise to structural color formation.