Taking a closer look at butterfly's iridescent wings is paving the way for next-generation solar and stealth technologies. 

The iridescent blue Morpho Didius became a muse for a group of ANU engineers fascinated by the tiny cone-line shaped nanostructures that scatter light to create its luminous colour. 

Lead researcher Dr Niraj Lal said until now being able to make light go exactly where you wanted it to had proven tricky. 

Harnessing these structures to better control the transmission and reflection of light from a surface was important for a wide range of technologies including photovoltaics, architecture, as well as stealth, anti-counterfeiting and signal processing technologies.

"We were surprised by how well our tiny cone-shaped structures worked to direct different colours of light where we wanted them to go," he said.

"Techniques to finely control the scattering, reflection and absorption of different colours of light are being used in the next generation of very high-efficiency solar panels," he said.

The aim of the team's light experiments was to absorb all of the blue, green and ultraviolet colours of sunlight in the perovskite layer of a solar cell. And to absorb all of the red, orange and yellow light in the silicon layer - known as a tandem solar cell with double-decker layers.

Researchers at the ANU surpassed silicon efficiency records with such a cell last month.

But beyond solar technology the technique could one day be used to make opaque objects transparent to certain colours, and vice versa, as part of new stealth applications.

Or in architecture to control how much light and heat passed through windows.

"Using our approach, a window could be designed to be transparent to some colours, non-see through and matt textured for others – so there are very cool potential applications in architecture," Dr Lal said. 

The research paper was published in ACS Photonics, with co-authors Kevin Le, Andrew Thomson, Maureen Brauers, Tom White and Kylie Catchpole.

Dr Lal said the technique, inspired by nature, had strong commercial promise as it was very scalable and did not require expensive technology.