Structural Colors in the Realm of Nature

Abstract

The structural colors appearing in nature often utilize special mechanisms capable to enhance the coloration by elementary optical processes.They are originated, therefore, from complex interactions between light and sophisticated microstructures created in the natural world. This book, organized by 9 Chapters, 2 Appendices, and an Index of Scientific Names, has been written on the basis of the physical phenomena and not of the coloration mechanisms of the selected species. The physical basis for each color phenomenon has been reported, in order to give a reply to the interactions between light and microstructures recovered in different animal and plant species. Thus, the fundamental properties of light such as reflection, refraction, interference, and diffraction have been quantitatively treated, reporting many interesting studies made by the use of electronic microscopy and other modern optical techniques with the scope to verify the structural complex colors and related crystalline structures appearing in nature. This is the reason why the structural colors recovered in nature have been a subject of many scientific papers because of their applications in many industrial fields related to vision such as painting, automobile, cosmetics, display, and textile. However it has been shown that, in spite of the progress of the structural studies in biology, formation, functions, and the physical interpretation of many colors based on simple and natural microstructures are quite limited even up to now.