Nanostructured fibers as a versatile photonic platform: radiative cooling and waveguiding through transverse Anderson localization

摘要

Broadband high reflectance in nature is often the result of randomly,three-dimensionally structured materials.This study explores unique optical properties associated with one-dimensional nanostructures discovered in silk cocoon fibers of the comet moth,Argema mittrei.The fibers are populated with a high density of air voids randomly distributed across the fiber cross-section but are invariant along the fiber.These filamentary air voids strongly scatter light in the solar spectrum.A single silk fiber measuring ～50 μm thick can reflect 66％ of incoming solar radiation,and this,together with the fibers' high emissivity of 0.88 in the mid-infrared range,allows the cocoon to act as an efficient radiative-cooling device.Drawing inspiration from these natural radiative-cooling fibers,biomimetic nanostructured fibers based on both regenerated silk fibroin and polyvinylidene difluoride are fabricated through wet spinning.Optical characterization shows that these fibers exhibit exceptional optical properties for radiative-cooling applications:nanostructured regenerated silk fibers provide a solar reflectivity of 0.73 and a thermal emissivity of 0.90,and nanostructured polyvinylidene difluoride fibers provide a solar reflectivity of 0.93 and a thermal emissivity of 0.91.The filamentary air voids lead to highly directional scattering,giving the fibers a highly reflective sheen,but more interestingly,they enable guided optical modes to propagate along the fibers through transverse Anderson localization.This discovery opens up the possibility of using wild silkmoth fibers as a biocompatible and bioresorbable material for optical signal and image transport.