Had it not been about the designs and over-hype surrounding gold, I don’t think I would ever considered wearing gold jewelry. The primary reason being I am fond of pepped up colors and unless you’re fixing stones or some embellishment, gold doesn’t offer you any choices except for the white (rhodium-plated) or yellow lacquer. Optoelectronics engineers have discovered something that could make this limitation a thing of past.
They have devised a technique to make gold of any color by carving tiny shapes onto its surface. As a matter of fact, Gold as metal is actually colorless. It absorbs blue light which gives it the yellow color. With silver, one can have any color whereas copper owes its reddish orange hue to absorption of blue and green light.
Jianfa Zhang at the University of Southampton with her colleagues has incepted an interesting way to carve a different type of repeating pattern on the surface of a metal. The patterns would be smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The properties of the electrons of the metal would thus be altered. The variation in size and depth of these pattern rings will alter the metal’s absorption and reflection of light. Apart from this, all the other properties would remain intact.
This innovation does hold a key to a plethora of designs and wonders which jewelry folks could do with gold. I wonder how much time it would take to actually see colored gold accessories hitting the retail shelves. I just hope it’s before my big fat Indian wedding.
Via: Gizmodo and TechnologyReview
