Biomimetics: Lessons on optics from nature's school

[DQE]

I just read a very interesting new review article on this topic in "Physics Today", available for free online and as a PDF:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/ma ... /PT.3.2816

The Introduction follows:
----------------------------------

The spectacular colors of living creatures are often produced by intricate arrays of photonic elements, including some that researchers wouldn’t otherwise have thought of.

Throughout its history, science has drawn inspiration from natural phenomena and structures. But as branches of science mature, they develop an increasingly rich store of ideas, techniques, and technology, and the tendency to search the realm of nature for inspiration diminishes. Optics is one of the oldest branches of science, and many of its current practitioners perhaps imagine that most of what could be learned from nature was learned in the epochs of Isaac Newton, Francesco Grimaldi, Thomas Young, and Augustin Fresnel.

With increasing maturity, however, come new tools with which we can look more closely at some of nature’s more subtle structures and discover things hidden from previous explorers. The emerging field of optical biomimetics seeks to examine structures in living systems, to understand how they deliver optical effects, and perhaps to discover new designs, arrived at by evolution, that may be applied in technology.

In this article we present some examples of optical systems in nature from which we may learn old solutions for new applications. We believe all practitioners of optics should be interested in optical biomimetics for the bridges it builds to the world of living systems and the lessons it teaches about how we might approach our craft. Laboratory researchers, for example, often focus on optimizing a single parameter or property and are drawn to exotic materials for the refractive-index extremes they provide. The biological world, on the other hand, provides examples of solutions that combine adequate performance across a range of properties and use a limited range of materials. Biomimetics illustrates that you don’t have to use high contrasts in refractive index if you can cleverly exploit structural variation.