Fig. 1. Reverse electrostriction directed assembly (REDA).
a Conventional crystal-growth and electrostriction process, which takes several hours. b The REDA approach can achieve large-area monocrystalline BPLCs of various crystalline symmetries in minutes. Cooling a monocrystalline BPLC formed by REDA causes anisotropic lattice distortion and thereby transforms the crystal into different symmetries, including the never-before-seen monoclinic (M) symmetry. The capital letter in each | 〉 denotes the crystal symmetry formed at a particular electric field strength via REDA with or without additional cooling (C: cubic, O: orthorhombic, T: tetragonal, M: monoclinic). |O1〉, |O2〉, and |O3〉 are orthorhombic states with different ratios of the lattice parameters. Inset at the upper right shows the crystal structure of a [110]BCC-oriented BPLC and associated lattice parameters a, b, and c (see Section Lattice parameters and symmetries). Skew angle β is the complementary angle to the angle formed between a and b axes (see Section Monoclinic symmetry).