Fabrication of the Liquid-Crystalline Polymer Film with Three-Dimensional Alignment Patterns by Scanning WavePhotopolymerization

摘要

The control of molecular alignment enhances nanoscale molecular functions tomacroscale material ones and thus plays an important role for developing high-performancedevices [1].The simple and practical method for the alignment control using mechanical stressenables one to fabricate one-dimensional alignment over large areas.A photoalignment methodhas attracted much attention due to its clean and non-contact process [2].With conventionalphotoalignment methods,one typically irradiates a LC film containing added photoresponsivedye molecules with spatiotemporally uniform linearly polarized light,and controls the net LCalignment via the interaction between the dye dipole and the polarization axis of light.Thisadvanced technology has already achieved various applications such as state-of-the-art LCdisplays.Recently,we have reported a new concept of scanning wave photopolymerization tooptically control molecular alignment with a dye-free system [3].In this study,we fabricatedthe liquid-crystalline polymer films with three-dimensional alignment patterns and investigatedan ability of the polymer films as an alignment layer for LCs.