Light‐Induced in Situ Dynamic Ordered Wrinkling with Arbitrarily Tailorable Wrinkling Orientation for Photoresponsive Soft Photonics

Spontaneous surface wrinkling provides a simple universal approach to pattern surfaces for a new generation of smart systems. Dynamic programmable manipulation of surface wrinkling especially with on-demand wrinkling orientation is highly required yet remains a great challenge. Here, an intriguing azopolymer-based system with a novel polarization-responsive dynamic oriented wrinkling behavior is reported. During a linearly polarized light illumination, in situ dynamic aligned wrinkling is induced with the wrinkling orientation perpendicular to the polarization direction, irrespective of as-imposed boundaries. This polarization-dependent dynamic wrinkling is attributed to the polarized light-induced photo-orientation of azopolymer. This fascinating polarization-dependent dynamic wrinkling characteristic offers a desirable platform to fabricate unprecedented all-optically reconfigurable hierarchical wrinkling morphologies with arbitrarily tailorable wrinkling orientation and location. As demonstrated, the polarization-responsive dynamic wrinkling system has wide applications for photoresponsive soft photonics, in particular as an adoptable nonmechanical beam steering device to differentiate/manipulate light propagation in the case of different incident light polarizations/wavelengths/intensities.