WASHINGTON: Researchers have created a revolutionary colour-display technology that may pave the way for camouflaging metamaterials that can "see" colours and automatically blend into the background.

 The new full-colour display technology uses aluminum nanoparticles to create the vivid red, blue and green hues found in today's top-of-the-line LCD televisions and monitors.

 The breakthrough is the latest in a string of recent discoveries by a team led by Rice University's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) that set out in 2010 to create metamaterials capable of mimicking the camouflage abilities of cephalopods - the family of marine creatures that includes squid, octopus and cuttlefish.

 "We know cephalopods have some of the same proteins in their skin that we have in our retinas, so part of our challenge, as engineers, is to build a material that can 'see' light the way their skin sees it, and another challenge is designing systems that can react and display vivid camouflage patterns," said LANP Director Naomi Halas, a co-author of the study.

 LANP's new colour display technology delivers bright red, blue and green hues from five-micron-square pixels that each contains several hundred aluminum nanorods.

 By varying the length of the nanorods and the spacing between them, LANP researchers Stephan Link and Jana Olson showed they could create pixels that produced dozens of colours, including rich tones of red, green and blue that are comparable to those found in high-definition LCD displays.

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