Solid and hollow inorganic replicas of biological photonic crystals

Photonic crystals in nature give rise to structural colors in a wide variety of organisms. We combine intriguing biological photonic structures, taken from weevils, with sol–gel templating to create a pallet of robust silica and titania replicas. Structural and optical characterization results are used to calculate band diagrams and density of optical states distributions, revealing that these replicas possess multiple overlapping photonic stop gaps with strongly modified density of optical states.