Polymer distributed bragg reflectors for vapor sensing

We establish a new strategy to achieve fast and responsive hybrid distributed Bragg reflectors for environmental vapor sensing. We fabricated easily processable zinc oxide-polystyrene nanocomposites to grow high quality multilayers with large gas permeability and dielectric contrast, which enable fast and sensitive detection of vapor analytes. Multilayers fabricated by simple spin-coating of the nanocomposite and cellulose acetate show a 10-fold enhancement of the optical response to toluene exposure compared to reference distributed Bragg reflectors built with bare polystyrene.