For a decade now the subject of the nature of the two-dimensional melting transition has
remained controversial. An elegant theory based on the unbinding of pairs of crystal defects …

This article reviews, from a very personal point of view, the origins and the early work on
transitions driven by topological defects such as vortices in the two dimensional planar rotor …

This book is the first to develop a unified gauge theory of condensed matter systems
dominated by vortices or defects and their long-range interactions. Gauge fields provide the …

Techniques for directing the assembly of metal or semiconductor quantum dots into novel
superstructures have been extensively pursued over the past decades. 1-3 Recent interest …

Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on
two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology …

The considerable activity in the area of organic thin films, involving very thin polymeric films
and molecular monolayers and multilayers, led to the formation of a panel, sponsored by the …

Based on graduate lectures given by the authors, Smectic and Columnar Liquid Crystals:
Concepts and Physical Properties Illustrated by Experiments examines lamellar (smectic) …

In a membrane with in plane orientational order, the topology determines the total strength of
the disclinations and thus controls the total elastic energy. Making use of this remark we …

Defects are local breakings of symmetry in an ordered medium. The physics of defects has
long been reduced to the study of dislocations in solids, and to the main physical …

We propose and analyze an effective free energy describing the physics of disclination
defects in particle arrays constrained to move on an arbitrary two-dimensional surface. At …