(115g) Integrating Experiment and Simulation to Understand and Control the Structural Color of Defect-Laden Colloidal Crystals

Colloids self-assembled into crystals can recapitulate the iridescent structural color found in organisms such as butterflies, beetles, and cephalopods. However, the brilliance of the color in artificial materials often falls short of what is achieved in living systems. One origin of this discrepancy are defect structures present in the artificially self-assembled materials; such defects are typically abundant in colloidal crystals. Here we discuss work to understand and anneal defect structures in colloidal crystals; we link the type and abundance of defects directly with the intensity of the material’s structural color response. We describe how this progress was accomplished by close integration of confocal microscopy experiments and computer simulation. Furthermore, and in honor of Sharon C. Glotzer, we discuss how the experimental component of the self-assembly and optical characterization has benefited from this integration, because using simulation methods not only provides mechanistic understanding of confocal microscopy observations, but also expands the range of conditions that can be analyzed.