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Will future of smart lighting and window coatings enable energy-efficient cooling in smart buildings? Can printed color converters lead to next generation micro displays with high brightness, sharp image resolution, and ultra low-power consumption? Recently, exciting new physics of nanoscale optical materials has inspired a series of key explorations to manipulate, store and control the flow of information and energy at unprecedented dimensions. In this talk I will report our recent efforts on controlling light harvesting and conversion process using scalable micro/nanofabrication. These emerging optical materials show promise to a range of important applications, from optical networks and chip-scale photonic sensors to lasers, LEDs, and solar technology.

For example, pixelated color converters are envisioned to achieve full-color high-resolution display through down conversion of blue micro-LEDs. Quantum dots (QDs) are promising narrow-band converters of high quantum efficiency and brightness enabling saturated colors. However, challenges still remain to produce high resolution color-selective patterns compatible with the advanced blue micro-LEDs with pitch and pixel size approaching 1 µm. Here we demonstrate our preliminary study on scalable printing of high-resolution pixelated red and green color converters patterned through projection lithography. I will also discuss potential applications such as high-resolution wide-gamut microdisplay for mixed reality and high speed visible light communication.

In this talk, I will also introduce versatile 3D shape transformations of nanoscale structures by deliberate engineering of the topography-guided stress of gold nanostructures. By using the topography-guided stress equilibrium, rich 3D shape transformation such as buckling, rotation, and twisting of nanostructures is precisely achieved, which can be predicted by our mechanical modeling. Benefiting from the nanoscale 3D twisting features, giant optical chirality is achieved in an intuitively designed 3D pinwheel-like structure, in strong contrast to the achiral 2D precursor without nano-kirigami. The demonstrated nano-kirigami, as well as the exotic 3D nanostructures, could be adopted in broad nanofabrication platforms and could open up new possibilities for the exploration of functional micro-/nanophotonic and mechanical devices.