ABSTRACT
Surface wrinkle formation is ubiquitous in nature, and has become of great importance from the technological viewpoints of surface patterning and fabrications. To date, most of studies on the surface wrinkle formation have been achieved with surface thin films of fixed physical properties formed by deposition or lamination on elastomeric sheets such as poly(dimethyl siloxane) films. This article introduces our recent results on tunable surface wrinkle formation in response to light using azobenzene-containing liquid crystalline polymers. Two strategies are proposed: i) anisotropic wrinkle formation using a photoalignable radical initiator in UV-curable liquid crystal films, and ii) modulations of wrinkle formation using a series of azobenzene liquid crystalline polymers.
Funding
This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S23225003 to TS and B25286025 to SN), and for Young Scientists (B25810117 to MH) from The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan, the PRESTO program of Japan Science and Technology Agency to SN. This work was also supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Photosynergetics” (No. 15H01084) from MEXT, Japan.