Seungmin Nam, a postdoctoral researcher in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the first author of the paper (advisor: Professor Su Seok Choi), received an Encouragement Award at the 2024 Fall Meeting hosted by the Polymer Society of Korea. The paper was titled “Bidirectional Wavelength Tuning in Stretchable Chiral Liquid Crystal Elastomers using Multi-modal Soft Actuators.”

The research combines structural-color materials based on nanoscale helical structures with flexible actuators using electroactive polymers, enabling free bidirectional control of the nanostructures’ structural-color wavelength and color position.

It overcomes the limitation of unidirectional wavelength tuning in conventional flexible wavelength-tunable optical devices. The team developed a flexible, stretchable optical device that can freely change color toward both shorter and longer wavelengths across a broad visible range of 450–650 nm, substantially improving wavelength tuning capability.

The resulting flexible, stretchable optical device is expected to find applications in displays, optical sensors, optical camouflage, biomimetic sensors, smart wearable devices, and various broadband color and electromagnetic applications.

This research was supported by the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation’s funding program and Samsung Electronics.