These are photomicrographs of colloidal crystals of ZnS-coated latex spheres in air. The samples are illuminated at an oblique angle with white light. The colored regions show Bragg scatttering by the lattice, with the different colors corresponding to regions with different crystallographic orientations. The spheres are approx. 1 micron in diameter and have a ZnS shell approximately 100 nm in thickness. The size of the region that you can see is a few hundred microns.

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