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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BINGO (Bio-INspired GOld metamaterials)

Teaser

Summary

The main aim of this research project was to develop nature inspired gold metamaterials. Such metamaterials could open new ways for designing novel devices in the field of imaging, electronics and sensing. The key novelty of the action was to use self-assembled cellulose nanocrystals as templates to fabricate gold morphologies with chiral periodic organization. The cellulose-assisted synthesis of gold metamaterials has a potential to open a new green pathway for fabrication of novel metamaterials and potentially can become a breakthrough technique in metamaterial engineering.

Work performed

The main achievemnt of the fellowship was the development of a synthesis procedure toward nanoscale gold with chiral geometry. The tasks performed during the internship included: (i) extraction of cellulose nanocrystals from bulk cellulose, (II) their self-assembly to chiral nematic films, (III) wet-chemical synthesis of gold inside chiral cellulose templates. The proposed method allows tuning the dimensions of gold grains while retaining the structural properties of the scaffold. Further optimization of the procedure combined with the advanced optical characterization measurements can lead to the development of new metamaterial.

Final results

The main achievement of the fellowship was the development of a new synthesis concept for the gold synthesis inside chiral cellulose scaffolds. The preliminary experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is a very straightforward and powerful approach, because it allows tuning plasmonic properties of gold and structural coloration of cellulose independently from each other, which to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported yet.
Exploiting natural materials can lead to a more sustainable use of resources, which is a key requirement for the sustainable development of modern society and industry. The development of metamaterials mimicking the natural self-organization of cellulose nanocrystals can open a new area in metamaterial design for super-resolution imaging, ultra-sensitive sensing and cloaking. The method developed in this action can be generalized to semiconductors and metallic materials, other than gold, which can potentially reveal new exciting applications in the fields of sustainable energy, medicine and electronics.