Structural colour of butterfly wings

Understanding butterfly wing nanostructures for biomimetic photonic materials

The colours of butterfly wings are dramatic and exceptionally beautiful, produced not by pigments but by nanoscale structures within the wing itself. This project aims to understand the relationship between these nanostructures and the vivid colours they create, and to use this knowledge through biomimicry, to design next-generation photonic materials for applications ranging from waveguides in optical communications to improved solar cells (Figure 1). We focus on iridescent colours in native butterflies, spanning the spectrum from red through to blue. Butterflies use a range of different strategies to achieve these colours, particularly in the false eyes on their wings, making these regions an ideal system for structurally understanding colour in biomaterials.

In this project, you will use scanning electron microscopy, coupled with specialised biological sample preparation techniques, to image and characterise the nanoscale structures responsible for these colours. Prof. Tilley is Director of the Electron Microscope Unit at UNSW, and you'll have access to state-of-the-art, high-resolution scanning electron microscopes to unlock the structure–colour relationships in these biomaterials. You'll gain hands-on experience in electron microscopy and biological sample preparation. This project is well suited to undergraduate (Honours/summer scholarship) and PhD students with an interest in materials chemistry, biomaterials, and photonics.

Figure 1. The Bright Cornelian butterfly with distinctive false eyes that have orange and blue colours.

References

1. Rodríguez, R. E.; Agarwal, S. P.; An, S.; Kazyak, E.; Das, D.; Shang, W.; Skye, R.; Deng, T.; Dasgupta, N. P. Biotemplated Morpho Butterfly Wings for Tunable Structurally Colored Photocatalysts. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2018, 10 (5), 4614–4621.