Engineering of Diffuse Structural Colors

Abstract Nowadays, structural colors successfully replace pigment‐based ones. Most of the newly proposed solutions rely on plasmonic systems, so speaking nanosized objects, exhibiting strongly size‐dependent optical properties. As a consequence, the fabrication requires high‐precision and time‐consuming technologies. A concept dealing with sub‐micronic surface features, easily reproducible on a large scale is proposed. The designed metasurface consists of randomly distributed holes serving both as cavity resonators and scatterers. The proposed solution grants an efficient control of the spatial distribution of diffuse light and offers a large palette of vibrant colors. The interferometric model and a two‐layer angular spectrum method provide a solid description of the physical origin of the phenomenon, with a high degree of agreement between simulations and experimental data.