High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise

Doekele G Stavenga; Hein L Leertouwer; Daniel C Osorio; Bodo D Wilts

doi:10.1038/lsa.2015.16

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High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise

Original Articles

- High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 4, Issue 1, (2015)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Computational Physics, University of Groningen, 9747 AG, The Netherlands
  2.School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK
- Author bio：
  
  Professor DG Stavenga, Computational Physics, University of Groningen, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands Email: D.G.Stavenga@rug.nl
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/lsa.2015.16
  CLC：
- Published：2015-03，
  
  Published Online：01 December 2014，
  
  Received：23 June 2014，
  
  Revised：19 November 2014，
  
  Accepted：21 November 2014
- Accepted：
Scan QR Code
Stavenga, D. G. et al. High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise. Light: Science & Applications, 4, e243 (2015).
DOI：

Stavenga, D. G. et al. High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise. Light: Science & Applications, 4, e243 (2015). DOI： 10.1038/lsa.2015.16.

摘要

Abstract

Male Lawes's Parotia

a bird of paradise

use the highly directional reflection of the structurally colored

brilliant-silvery occipital feathers in their courtship display. As in other birds

the structural coloration is produced by ordered melanin pigmentation. The barbules of the Parotia's occipital feathers

with thickness ~3 µm

contain 6–7 layers of densely packed melanin rodlets (diameter ~0.25 µm

length ~2 µm). The effectively ~0.2 µm thick melanin layers separated by ~0.2 µm thick keratin layers create a multilayer interference reflector. Reflectance measurements yielded peak wavelengths in the near-infrared at ~1.3 µm

i.e.

far outside the visible wavelength range. With the Jamin-Lebedeff interference microscopy method recently developed for pigmented media

we here determined the refractive index of the intact barbules. We thus derived the wavelength dependence of the refractive index of the barbules' melanin to be 1.7–1.8 in the visible wavelength range. Implementing the anatomical and refractive index data in an optical multilayer model

we calculated the barbules' reflectance

transmittance and absorptance spectra

thereby confirming measured spectra.

关键词

Keywords

bird of paradiseinterference reflectoriridescenceJamin-Lebedeff microscopymultilayer

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