Chameleon Skin Inspired Au Nanodisk Patterned Strain Responsive PDMS Film

Abstract

This work demonstrates e-beam lithography patterned Au nanodisk array on flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) film for the optomechanical strain sensitive artificial skin-like chameleon lizard skin. A matrix array of gold nanodisk was fabricated on PDMS with an interparticle separation equal to the order of the wavelength of light. The external strain on the engineered PDMS film leads to change in interparticle distance between gold nanodisks. This change affects the plasmonic coupling with an incident light wave that leads to a shift in film color. In this work, gold nanodisks were fabricated using e-beam patterning on insulating PDMS film. The resulting film showed excellent strain sensing characteristics up to 40% strain.