Buckled Patterns and Functions Emerged on Wrinkles, Liquid Crystals, and Liquid Crystal Elastomers

Abstract

Patterns perceived as regular by humans are ubiquitous and can be classified into non-biological patterns like cloud formations and sand dune stripes, biological patterns like zebra stripes, and artificial patterns like tiles. This paper focuses on three examples of non-biological self-organized patterns: wrinkles on material surfaces, alignment defect structures in liquid crystals, and a layered structure in liquid crystal elastomers. These non-biological patterns exhibiting useful functions are advantageous due to their low fabrication costs compared to biological and artificial patterns.