The visual appearances of disordered optical metasurfaces

Abstract

Nanostructured materials have recently emerged as a promising approach for material appearance design. Research has mainly focused on creating structural colours by wave interference, leaving aside other important aspects that constitute the visual appearance of an object, such as the respective weight of specular and diffuse reflectances, object macroscopic shape, illumination and viewing conditions. Here, we report the potential of disordered optical metasurfaces for harnessing visual appearance. We develop a multiscale modelling platform for the predictive rendering of macroscopic objects covered by metasurfaces in realistic settings, showing how nanoscale resonances and mesoscale interferences can be used to spectrally and angularly shape reflected light and thus create unusual visual effects at the macroscale. We validate this property with realistic synthetic images of macroscopic objects and centimetre-scale samples observable with the naked eye. This framework opens new perspectives in many branches of fine and applied visual arts.