We have formed an interdisciplinary team to consider a suite of problems in the optics of amorphous nanostructures, inspired in part by the striking colors of the feathers of certain birds. In these cases the bright colors are not due to absorption due to dyes. Rather, they result from wavelength-selective scattering by textured arrays of nano-domains. This must be a consequence of spatial correlations among the nano-domains, and suggests a relationship to the mechanism that underlies random lasers. We propose to explore this relationship by both experiment and theory.
Thursday, December 5, 2013