New materials aim at exploiting the great control of living organisms over
molecular architectures and minerals. Optical biomimetics has been widely
developed by microengineering, leading to photonic components with order
resembling those found in plants and animals. These systems, however, are
realized by complicated and adverse processes. Here we show how
biomineralization might enable the one-step generation of components for
amorphous photonics, in which light is made to travel through disordered
scattering systems, and particularly of active devices such as random lasers,
by using electrospun fiber templates. The amount of bio-enzymatically produced
silica is related to light-scattering capacity and the resulting organosilica
surfaces exhibit a transport mean free path for light as low as 3 micron, and
lasing with linewidth below 0.2 nm. The resulting, complex optical material is
characterized and modelled to elucidate scattered fields and lasing
performance. Tightly-controlled nanofabrication of direct biological
inspiration establishes a new concept for the additive manufacturing of
engineered light-diffusing materials and photonic components, not addressed by
existing technologies.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figure
