Bio-Inspired gold metamaterials
The development of metamaterials has opened new opportunities for designing novel devices in the field of imaging, data storage and sensing. Although some progress has been achieved in in this emerging area, the fabrication of nanoscale metamaterials with tailorable geometries still remains challenging. This proposal aims to develop a facile and scalable synthesis approach to gold metamaterials inspired by nature. The key novelty of the action is to use self-assembled cellulose nanocrystals as templates to fabricate gold morphologies with chiral periodic organization. The goals of the action are (I) the isolation of cellulose nanocrystals from bulk celluloses and their co-assembly to highly organized CNC and CNC/Au chiral scaffolds, (II) the post-treatment of  such chiral films to achieve high porosity and excellent compatibility with gold precursors, (III) the development of a facile wet-chemical route to continuous gold morphologies exploiting the self-assembly of cellulose nanocrystals, (VI) the optical characterization of CNC-templated gold structures. The cellulose-assisted synthesis of gold metamaterials has a potential to open a new pathway for fabrication of novel metamaterials and potentially can become a breakthrough technique in metamaterial engineering.