Photo-modulations of surface wrinkles formed on elastomer sheets

ABSTRACTSurface 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.