Seungmin Nam, a postdoctoral researcher in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the paper’s first author (advisor: Professor Su Seok Choi), received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Meeting on Information Display (IMID 2024), a globally prestigious display conference. The paper was titled “Bidirectional Wavelength Tunable Structural Color using Stretchable Chiral Photonic Elastomers on Multi-Modal Soft Actuators.”

The study used flexible, stretchable chiral liquid crystal elastomers and dielectric elastomer actuators to freely change the length of nanostructures, implementing technology that tunes color wavelengths in both directions.

This overcomes the technical limitation of conventional nanostructural-color technologies, which allowed tuning in only one direction. Free adjustment toward both shorter and longer wavelengths increases the potential for practical flexible optical device applications.

The results suggest applications in diverse optical and electronic devices, including displays, image sensors, and biodevices, and are expected to have a substantial technological impact.