Photoinduced surface topography of nematic elastomers: a Green function approach

This paper studies photoinduced surface deformation of nematic elastomers containing azobenzene molecules. In the framework of a phenomenological model, a unified approach based on the Green function technique is proposed to predict the resulting surface topographies. The orientation of the nematic axis and the pattern of illumination can be arbitrary, and the calculation of the surface profile is finally reduced to the estimation of certain volume integrals. To demonstrate the application and to show the efficiency of the approach, two numerical examples are given. We expect that the present work can provide useful informative traces for creating desired surface topographies