Self-assembly of soft materials attracts keen interest for patterning applications owing to its ease and spontaneous behavior. We report the fabrication of nanogrooves using sublimation and recondensation of liquid crystal (LC) materials. First, well-aligned smectic LC structures are obtained on the micron-scale topographic patterns of the microchannel; then, the sublimation and recondensation process directly produces nanogrooves having sub-200-nm scale. The entire process can be completed in less than 30 min. After it is replicated using an ultraviolet-curable polymer, our platform can be used as an alignment layer to control other guest LC materials.
Keywords: alignment layer; liquid crystal; nanogrooves; sublimation and recondensation; topographic patterns.