ArticleNature photonics2023
Brilliant whiteness in shrimp from ultra-thin layers of birefringent nanospheres.
Article in Nature photonics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Damselflies overcome color saturation barriers of photonic glasses via pigment loading and refractive index modulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Control Strategies in Guanine Biocrystallization.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Review
- Cell type diversification and phenotype convergence underlying white fin-ornamentation of cyprinid fishes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Harnessing microalgae for the biosynthesis of molecular crystals.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- The Molecular Basis of Growth Control in Guanine Crystals.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Recent Progress on Bio-Inspired Highly Scattering Polymeric Materials.ACS macro letters · 2026Article
- Uric Acid Monohydrate Nanocrystals: An Adaptable Platform for Nitrogen and Salt Management in Reptiles.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
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- Article
- Guanine Crystallization by Particle Attachment.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Specialized molecular pathways drive the formation of light-scattering assemblies in leucophores.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Nanoscale ultrastructures increase the visual conspicuousness of signalling traits in obligate cleaner shrimps.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Structural color in the bacterial domain: The ecogenomics of a 2-dimensional optical phenotype.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Brilliant whiteness in shrimp from ultra-thin layers of birefringent nanospheres.Nature photonics · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A fundamental question regarding light scattering is how whiteness, generated from multiple scattering, can be obtained from thin layers of materials. This challenge arises from the phenomenon of optical crowding, whereby, for scatterers packed with filling fractions higher than ~30%, reflectance is drastically reduced due to near-field coupling between the scatterers. Here we show that the extreme birefringence of isoxanthopterin nanospheres overcomes optical crowding effects, enabling multiple scattering and brilliant whiteness from ultra-thin chromatophore cells in shrimp. Strikingly, numerical simulations reveal that birefringence, originating from the spherulitic arrangement of isoxanthopterin molecules, enables intense broadband scattering almost up to the maximal packing for random spheres. This reduces the thickness of material required to produce brilliant whiteness, resulting in a photonic system that is more efficient than other biogenic or biomimetic white materials which operate in the lower refractive index medium of air. These results highlight the importance of birefringence as a structural variable to enhance the performance of such materials and could contribute to the design of biologically inspired replacements for artificial scatterers like titanium dioxide.
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