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

Abstract 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.