The Development of New Catalytic Pigments Based on SiO2 Amorphous Photonic Crystals via Adding of Dual-Functional Black TiO2-x Nanoparticles

Biomimetic synthesis of amorphous photonic crystals (APCs) is an effective approach to obtaining non-iridescent structural colors. However, the structural colors of artificially prepared APCs are dim or even white due to the influence of incoherent scattering. In this paper, we present a novel method to combine APCs with black TiO2-x to construct a noniridescent structural color pigments with high visibility and photocatalytic activity. Due to the absorption of incoherently scattered light by black TiO2-x , the color saturation of structural colors has been significantly increased. In addition, the utilization rate of photogenic carriers was effectively enhanced by the slow light effect generated from the pseudoband gap of SiO2 APCs with TiO2-x absorbed full spectrum. The tone and color saturation of catalytic pigments is controlled by the diameter of SiO2 nanospheres and the ratio of TiO2-x nanoparticles, which provides a controllable application study in color-related fields as artwork, environmental coatings, and textiles.