High-resolution inkjet printing of polymerized chiral liquid crystal droplets on periodically rotating photoalignment layers.

This research addresses the challenge of controlling complex director fields in confined chiral liquid crystal (CLC) geometries. CLC droplets were inkjet-printed onto high-resolution photoalignment patterns to study the competition among chiral pitch, geometric confinement, and surface-alignment periodicity. Polarized microscopy analysis and conceptual 3D modeling reveal that surface photoalignment dictates the droplet structure, steering the director field independently of the curved droplet's profile. Findings show that at small periods Λ, surface anchoring suppresses domain curvature in favour of a well-defined 1D director lattice. This transition confirms that photoalignment can either enforce directional orientation or allow curvilinear fields depending on the confinement.