Photoalignment of dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystals for electrically tunable patterns with fingerprint textures

We present a convenient photoalignment approach to fabricate rewritable fingerprint textures with designed geometrical patterns based on methyl red doped cholesteric liquid crystals (MDCLCs). MDCLC systems with/without nanoparticles of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS) were employed to realize two types of sophisticated binary patterns, respectively. Based on the understanding of involved mechanisms related to boundary conditions and middle-layer theory, we demonstrated the precise manipulation of fingerprint patterns by varying the fingerprint grating vectors in different domains. Notably, the hybrid-aligned liquid crystal configuration induced by POSS nanoparticles, which leads to the electrically rotatable grating, can be converted into the planar-aligned configuration by the adsorption of photoexcited methyl red molecules onto the indium-tin-oxide (ITO) surface. In this manner, the dynamic voltage-dependent behavior of fingerprint gratings is altered from the rotation mode (R-mode) to the on-off mode (O-mode).