Antireflective surface inspired from biology: A review

Optical anti-reflection means the decrease of reflection as much as possible, which has been used in many fields such as solar cells, diodes, optical and optoelectronic devices, screens, sensors, anti-glare glasses and so on. Over millions of years, natural creatures have been uninterruptedly combating with extreme environmental conditions. In particular, some biology has evolved a diversity of antireflective functional surfaces gradually. More importantly, as a result of the same order of magnitude in the ingenious structures and the wavelength of visible light, these structures can interact strongly and present excellent antireflective performance. It is worth to be mentioned that these wonderful architectures lead to a perfect performance on antireflection. This review mainly covers recent progress on the bionic antireflective structures. Then, the mechanism of the structure-based antireflective properties of some biology is analyzed. Besides, some typical models and the basic theory of these bionic structures for antireflection have been reported to facilitate mechanism analysis. At last, the prospects and the challenge researchers may faced with are also addressed. It is hoped that this review could be beneficial to provide some innovative inspirations and new ideas to the researchers in the fields of engineering, and materials science.