Creation of supramolecular thin film architectures with liquid-crystalline networks

In-situ photopolymerization of liquid-crystalline networks offers the opportunity to fix the molecular organisation of any LC phase in a thin plastic film. In addition to that, one has access to a number of additional techniques to affect the molecular organisation during or after the polymerization process which makes it possible to create odd molecular architectures in a controlled way. A number of these techniques are discussed in this paper.