Towards full-colour tunability of inorganic electrochromic devices using ultracompact fabry-perot nanocavities.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31949150.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-14194-y and PMC identifier 6965179.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Intercalation-based inorganic materials that change their colours upon ion insertion/extraction lay an important foundation for existing electrochromic technology. However, using only such inorganic electrochromic materials, it is very difficult to achieve the utmost goal of full-colour tunability for future electrochromic technology mainly due to the absence of structural flexibility. Herein, we demonstrate an ultracompact asymmetric Fabry-Perot (F-P) nanocavity-type electrochromic device formed by using partially reflective metal tungsten as the current collector and reflector layer simultaneously; this approach enables fairly close matching of the reflections at both interfaces of the WO<sub>3</sub> thin layer in device form, inducing a strong interference. Such an interference-enhanced device that is optically manipulated at the nanoscale displays various structural colours before coloration and, further, can change to other colours including blue, red, and yellow by changing the optical indexes (n, k) of the tungsten oxide layer through ion insertion.