Soft spheres yield photonic structures

From New York City, at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society

A novel method for creating light-manipulating patterns inside photonic crystals–materials that transmit and reflect specific wavelengths of light–could hasten the arrival of a new generation of faster, all-optical telecommunications technologies.

Instead of building photonic crystals out of hard materials such as silica, Andrew Lyon and his colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta used hydrogel nanoparticles–water-saturated polymer spheres that swell and contract in response to temperature.