Two-Dimensional Living Hyperuniformity in the Visible Regime

Structural color and transparency are common phenomena in life - these optical properties are found in many species of mammals, birds, insects, and even bacteria, and the mechanisms underpinning these optics are as diverse as the taxa in which they evolved. Here we report that a broad class of two-dimensional optical materials found in many taxonomically diverse organisms exhibits disordered hyperuniformity. We find the parameters that characterize hyperuniformity in each living system, and extract corresponding structure factors and spectral densities. We then construct molecular dynamics simulations of these particles using their observed interactions that are sufficiently large to capture electromagnetic interactions across the visible spectrum. Finite-difference time domain calculations of these simulated particles generally recapitulate the experimentally observed optical properties of the tissues, while similar systems with distortions do not, demonstrating that hyperuniformity provides a useful and thermodynamically rationalized framework for understanding the origins of the optical properties of these soft, evolved optical materials.