Abstract
Electrically tuned photonic crystals are produced by applying fields across shear-assembled elastomeric polymer opal thin films. At increasing voltages, the polymer opal films stretch biaxially under Maxwell stress, deforming the nanostructure and producing marked color changes. This quadratic electro-optic tuning of the photonic bandgap is repeatable over many cycles, switches within 100 ms, and bridges the gap between electro-active materials and photonic crystals.
Qibin Zhao
Associate Professor
My research focuses on soft functional materials in which mesoscale structure controls optical and physical properties. I have worked extensively on colloidal and particle-assembled photonic materials, developing scalable processing methods to organize soft particulate systems into structurally coloured films and coatings. A central theme of my work is how external mechanical fields, such as shear, bending, stretching, and cyclic deformation, can drive microstructural ordering, lattice transitions, and structure-dependent optical responses. More broadly, I am interested in programmable soft photonic materials and functional coatings, where colloidal assembly, deformation processing, and soft-matter physics can be used to create adaptive optical, thermal, sensing, or mechanically encoded material functions.