Photoalignment and patterning of nanostructures in liquid crystalline thin films

摘要

Thin films of organics/silica nanohybrids synthesized on a substrate have been subjects of extensiveinvestigation. In general, however, the nanostructures of the thin films are aligned only at local levels, but arerandomized at larger scales. Development of alignment methods for such nanostructures at larger scales is of greatdemand to extend applications. We report herein newly developped methods for macroscopic alignment andmicropatteming of nanohybrid films synthesized on a photo-crosslinkable liquid crystalline polymer thin film. Twotopics are included: First, the photoalignment of ordinary templating systems of 2D hexagonal liquid crystallinesurfactant micelles. Mesostructured organic/inorganic hybrid materials are widely studied. Here, the method ofphotoaligning and characterizations of the resulting materials will be presented. Second, the photoalignment ofchromonic columnar liquid crystal of dye aggregates. We have newly developed a procedure to synthesize a nanohybridconsisting of chromonic liquid crystal and silica network. This new type of chromonic nanohybrids is also found to bealigned by the identical photo-crosslinkable polymer film.