"When we fabricate optical systems today, we often want a high degree of order and we see disorder as adverse to obtaining such desired properties. Low tolerances are for example required for optical communications cables, DVDs and medical equipment to function properly. Nature sees it differently, though! Here, the tuning of disorder is what makes some of the most vivid colours in nature able to exist. The colouration principle is called structural colour and is based on interference of light with structures having features smaller than one millonth of a meter! The principle is for example seen in soap bubble, where the thin film of the bubble interferes with light. Shining blue butterflies (try searching ""Morpho rhetenor""), bird feathers in all appearances imaginable and much more can be created by controlling interference in a partially disordered system. If we can copy how nature so effortlessly incorporates disorder in its designs, we would be able to fabricate advanced optical systems much more easily, since we could interplay with manufacturing uncertainty instead of spending intense effort in trying to avoid it.
The objective of this fellowship is to investigate how colours that arise by interference are influenced by disorder and how we can understand them mathematically. This is done by focusing on a few specific examples and analysing the structures that give rise to colours in detail, by imaging their nanostructures using electron microscopy. We then creating computational tools to describe the optical effects arising from the disordered nanostructures such that we can gain a better understanding of these specific systems and try to generalising them to other systems in nature. By advancing the understanding of nature's nanofabrication, we will be able to understand nature better and to mimic its design principles better, in the long run leading to nanotechnology that is more fault tolerant and easier to produce."
