Alignment engineering in liquid crystalline elastomers: Free-form microstructures with multiple functionalities

We report a method to fabricate polymer microstructures with local control over the molecular orientation. Alignment control is achieved on molecular level in a structure of arbitrary form that can be from 1 to 100 μm in size, by fixing the local boundary conditions with micro-grating patterns. The method makes use of two-photon polymerization (Direct Laser Writing) and is demonstrated specifically in liquid-crystalline elastomers. This concept allows for the realization of free-form polymeric structures with multiple functionalities which are not possible to realize with existing techniques and which can be locally controlled by light in the micrometer scale.