Recently, single-substrate flexible liquid crystal (LC) devices have attracted considerable attention because they can provide desirable shapes, small weight, flexibility, and rollability. In this work, we fabricate a flexible single-substrate thermoresponsive cholesteric LC (CLC) film by a facile method called photoenforced stratification method. Our fabricated single-substrate CLC film consists of microscale polymer containers filled with a CLC solution. Our results showed that the temperature response of the fabricated single-substrate CLC film depends on the chiral material doped into the CLC solution. The single-substrate ultrathin CLC film exhibits very high flexibility and robustness without performance reduction. The fabricated flexible single-substrate CLC film may pave the way for the development of novel technologies for thermoresponsive devices with changeable shapes and designs.
Keywords: cholesteric liquid crystal; flexible application; liquid crystals; single-substrate film; stimuli-responsive materials.