Electrically responsive photonic crystals with highly sensitive response and low power consumption for color displays

Electrically responsive photonic crystal (ERPC) based on particle electrophoresis is a promising material for reflective color displays due to its bright and antiglare structural colors, low-voltage tuning, and good compatibility with the electrophoretic display techniques. However, there are still challenges to meet the multifaceted requirements for the display because of the low response sensitivity for most reported ERPCs. Here, we show a SiO₂/(DEGEEA-Aniline) ERPC with high response sensitivity and ultra-low power consumption. This ERPC possesses a broad color tuning range (220 nm) because the moderate interaction between mixing solvents and SiO₂ particles ensures a low particle assembly concentration and a large space for lattice compression. Meanwhile, this ERPC works at low voltage (0 ∼ 1.3 V) due to the low dielectric constant of the solvents and the enhancement of Coulombic interaction. As a result, the ERPC exhibits a response sensitivity of 169.2 nm/V, which is higher than most reported electrophoretic ERPCs. More importantly, this ERPC merely consumes 1.09 μW/cm² in successive color tuning under the precondition of stable and reversible response, which saves 96.5% of power compared to the traditional SiO₂/PCb ERPC.