Over the last few years, following a trend to miniaturization found in many fields of materials science, micron-sized liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE) actuators have been described, with the aim to apply them in such domains like responsive surfaces, microfluidic devices or microsensors. The preparations of the micron-sized LCE actuators involve plenty of cutting-edge, advanced technologies such as soft lithography, microfluidic, microprinting or photomasking. In this highlight, we describe the most striking results obtained in the domain of micron-sized LCE-based responsive systems.

A novel NIR-responsive GNR/LCE composite fiber material with a very low Au loading-level (0.09 wt%) is prepared by a three-step sequential thiol-click chemistry approach.