Structural Colors in the Realm of Nature
Shuichi Kinoshita
World Scientific Publishing Company
Structural colorations originate from self-organized microstructures, which  interact with light in a complex way to produce brilliant colors seen  everywhere in nature. Research in this field is extremely new and has been  rapidly growing in the last 10 years, because the elaborate structures created  in nature can now be fabricated through various types of nanotechnologies.  Indeed, a fundamental book covering this field from biological, physical, and  engineering viewpoints has long been expected.  <p>  Coloring in nature comes mostly from inherent colors of materials, though it  sometimes has a purely physical origin such as diffraction or interference of  light. The latter, called structural color or iridescence, has long been a  problem of scientific interest. Recently, structural colors have attracted  great interest because various photonic architectures, now developing in  modern technologies, have been spontaneously created in the self-organization  process and have been extensively used as one of the important visual  functions. In this book, the fundamental optical properties underlying  structural colors are explained, and these mysteries of nature are surveyed  from the viewpoint of biological diversity and according to their  sophisticated structures. The book proposes a general principle of structural  colors based on the structural hierarchy and presents up-to-date applications.  <p>  <b>Contents:  Introduction; Fundamentals of Structural Coloration; Butterflies and  Moths; Beetles and Other Insects; Birds; Fish; Plants; Miscellaneous;  Mathematical Background.