New Photo-Crosslinkable Benzaldehyde Polymers for Creating Liquid Crystal Lenses

We have studied new photo-crosslinkable benzaldehyde polymers with fragments including long hydrocarbon substituents in a side chain, as materials for creating a specified distribution of the pretilt angle of the director in a liquid crystal cell. We show that by changing the UV radiation exposure dose after rubbing the polymer layers, we can specify any pretilt angle in the range 0–90^o. We have obtained the distribution of pretilt angles needed for creating liquid crystal lenses, where the maximum azimuthal anchoring energy of the liquid crystal with the alignment layer is increased to 2.5·10^–5 J/m², which allowed us to substantially reduce the number of defects and to improve the optical quality of the liquid crystal lens.