Surface alignment of liquid crystals (LCs) is key for optimizing their performance. Effective LC alignment strongly depends on the substrate used, which should promote strong local anchoring of the director field. Our work introduces a novel method using nanolithography to control the alignment of thermotropic LCs. Key to the approach is the use of 3D nanoprinting to create customized parallel nanogrooves on a glass substrate. These grooves yield azimuthal anchoring energies ranging from 10^-6 J/m² to 10^-5 J/m², partially surpassing values from other photopolymers. This approach offers high spatial resolution (~2µm) and allows for electro-optical switching, thus providing a flexible substrate platform for LC applications.
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Schmidt et al. (2024) studied this question.
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