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Colloidal assemblies develop pronounced structural colors due to the selective diffraction of light. Micropatterns with multiple structural colors are appealing for the use in a variety of photonic applications. Here, a lithographic approach is reported, which provides a high level of control over the size, shape, and color of a micropattern using the anisotropic shrinkage of inverse opals made of a negative photoresist heated to high temperatures. Shrinkage occurs uniformly across the thickness of the film, leading to a blueshift in the structural color while maintaining a high reflectivity across the full visible spectrum. The rate of shrinkage is determined by the annealing temperature and the photoresist crosslinking density. The rate can, therefore, be spatially modulated by applying UV radiation through a photomask to create multicolor micropatterns from single-colored inverse opals. The lateral dimensions of the micropattern features can be as small as the thickness of the inverse opal.

Technologies to monitor microenvironmental conditions and its spatial distribution are in high demand, yet remain unmet need. Herein, photonic microsensors are designed in a capsule format that can be injected, suspended, and implanted in any target volume. Colorimetric sensors are loaded in the core of microcapsules by assembling core-shell colloids into crystallites through the depletion attraction. The shells of the colloids are made of a temperature-responsive hydrogel, which enables the crystallites to rapidly and widely tune the structural color in response to a change in temperature while maintaining close-packed arrays. The spherical symmetry of the microcapsules renders them optically isotropic, i.e., displaying orientation-independent color. In addition, as a solid membrane is used to protect the delicate crystallites from external stresses, their high stability is assured. More importantly, each microcapsule reports the temperature of its microenvironment so that a suspension of capsules can provide information on the spatial distribution of the temperature.