Nature Photonics 16, 226–234 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-00957-5
Advanced Materials 34, 2110170 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202110170
Due to the lack of appropriate reversible photoswitches, efficiently remote photoprogramming of self-organized soft helical superstructures represents a formidable challenge in particularly allowing multiple stable states, tuning over a broad spectral range and establishing coupling balance between photonic resonance and transmission. The team of Weihong Zhu, Zhigang Zheng and Ben Feringa brings forth a series of exciting light-switchable intrinsic chiral diarylethenes with extremely large helical twisting power (HTP) to enable the dynamic, helical, and optical microstructure manipulation of liquid crystals (LCs), unprecedentedly achieving controllable, selectable, and extractable multi-stable reflection states, meanwhile avoiding the inherent orientation disorderliness of LCs caused by multiple chiral sources. A cutting-edge multiple anti-counterfeiting technique, featuring color-tunability, erasability, reversibility, multi-stability and viewing-angle dependency of pre-recorded patterns, has been well demonstrated with the overwhelming intrinsic chiral superstructures. The new exciting strategy can create a gorgeous landscape of optical information processing and configuring, and even build up a unique laser in quadri-dimensional manipulation of wavelength, wavefront, spin angular momentum, and orbital angular momentum, endowing a sharp and narrow band-width with both remarkable thermodynamic stability and robust fatigue-resistance.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Yu, J. Intrinsic chiral photoswitches manipulate soft-materials. Light Sci Appl 11, 95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-022-00785-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-022-00785-w