Active electrochemical high-contrast gratings as on/off switchable and color tunable pixels.

To be viable for display applications, active structural colors must be electrically tunable, on/off switchable, and reversible. Independently controlling the first two functions, however, is difficult because of causality that ties the real and imaginary parts of the optical constants or changing overlap of fields during structural variations. Here, we demonstrate an active reflective color pixel that encompasses separate mechanisms to achieve both functions reversibly by electrochemically depositing and dissolving Cu inside the dielectric grating slits on a Pt electrode with ΔV < 3 V. Varying the modal interference via Cu occupancy in the slits changes the CIE space coverage by up to ~72% under cross-polarized imaging. In the same pixel, depolarization and absorption by the dissolving porous Cu switches the color off with a maximum contrast of ~97%. Exploiting these results, we demonstrate an active color-switching display and individually addressable on/off pixel matrix that highlights their potential in reflective display applications.