Journal
ACS APPLIED MATERIALS & INTERFACES
Volume 11, Issue 11, Pages 10895-10904Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b22465
Keywords
chiral liquid crystals; diffraction gratings; molecular switches; helix inversion; light
Funding
- Russian Foundation for Basic Research [19-03-00337]
- Russian Ministry of Education and Science [3.1586.2017/4.6]
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
- Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs
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The future of adaptive materials will rely on transduction of molecular motion across increasing length scales, up to the macroscopic and functional level. In this context, liquid crystals have emerged as a promising amplification medium, in view of their long-range order and high sensitivity to external stimuli, and in particular, chiral liquid crystals have demonstrated widely tunable optical properties and invertible handedness. Here, we demonstrate that by applying weak electric fields, regular, periodic and light-tunable patterns can be formed spontaneously in cholesteric liquid crystals. These patterns can be used as light-tunable diffraction gratings for which the period, the diffraction efficiency, and the in-plane orientation of grating vector can be controlled precisely, reversibly, and independently. Such a photoregulation allows generating a variety of one- and two-dimensional complex diffractive patterns in a single material. Our data are also supported by modeling and theoretical calculations. Overall, the fine tunability of cholesteric materials doped with artificial molecular switches makes them attractive for optics and photonics.
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