Mechanisms for converting electrical energy into mechanical energy are essential for the design of nanoscale transducers, sensors, actuators, motors, pumps, artificial muscles, and medical microrobots. Nanometre-scale actuation has to date been mainly achieved by using the (linear) piezoelectric effect in certain classes of crystals (for example, quartz), and 'smart' ceramics such as lead zirconate titanate. But the strains achievable in these materials are small--less than 0.1 per cent--so several alternative materials and approaches have been considered. These include grafted polyglutamates (which have a performance comparable to quartz), silicone elastomers (passive material--the constriction results from the Coulomb attraction of the capacitor electrodes between which the material is sandwiched) and carbon nanotubes (which are slow). High and fast strains of up to 4 per cent within an electric field of 150 MV x m(-1) have been achieved by electrostriction (this means that the strain is proportional to the square of the applied electric field) in an electron-irradiated poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) copolymer. Here we report a material that shows a further increase in electrostriction by two orders of magnitude: ultrathin (less than 100 nanometres) ferroelectric liquid-crystalline elastomer films that exhibit 4 per cent strain at only 1.5 MV x m(-1). This giant electrostriction was obtained by combining the properties of ferroelectric liquid crystals with those of a polymer network. We expect that these results, which can be completely understood on a molecular level, will open new perspectives for applications.

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On a base of time-resolved step-scan IR-spectroscopy data, we present a detailed model of the segmental reorientation during the ferroelectric and electroclinic switching of a chiral liquid crystalline dimer. We detected that the magnitude of the motion of the molecular segments differ from each other: The tilt angle is maximal for the mesogens and minimal for the "virtual polysiloxane backbone." In contrast to a recently published conjecture, we prove that in the ms scale the responses of different molecular segments are unambiguously synchronous with each other. [S0031-9007(97)

Time-resolved polarized Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy on thin microtomized sections of single-crystal ferroelectric liquid crystalline elastomers (SC-FLCE) is employed to analyze its structure and mobility in response to an external electric field. Due to its specificity, FTIR spectroscopy enables to determine the orientation, the order parameter, and the extension and time scale of the motion for different molecular moieties. It is shown that under the influence of an external electric field the mesogenic units perform a motion on the tilt cone which is hindered by the elastomeric network. Although the different molecular moieties have a widely varying excursion of their motion, their response to the external electric field takes place simultaneously on a time scale of about 10 ms.