General purpose soft template for photonic applications. From all-optical to electrical reconfigurability

In this paper we report on the realization and characterization of a polymer template sculptured in photosensitive material on a chemical inert surface, devoted to micro/nano-confinement of a wide range of organic components, with self-arrangement properties at the nanoscale. The high quality morphology of the polymeric micropattern arrays is obtained by combining a nano-precision level optical holographic setup and a multi-step chemico-physical process. The general purpose template represents the basic platform to be filled with different soft composite materials: Due to their self organization capabilities, light responsive Liquid Crystals (LC) and short pitch Cholesteric LC have been investigated. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.