Nanowire-based artificial photoreceptors with multi-hyperuniformity inspired by chicken retina

Abstract

Retinal cells of chicken possess a hyperuniform distribution enabling exceptional spatial sampling. Recently, interest has grown in mimicking biological imaging systems for optoelectronics technology. However, since biological retinal cells and current imaging pixels have a significant scale mismatch such as super-micron and sub-micron, the applicability of hyperuniform distribution must be investigated at sub-micron scale, considering wave-optics phenomena. In this study, we present theoretical analyses and design strategies for nanowire-based artificial photoreceptors with hyperuniformity. Full-wave analyses reveal that the selectivity of hyperuniformly patterned photoreceptors outperforms other configurations for each wavelength (red, green, blue, and near-infrared lights) without additional spectral filters. © 2024 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement.