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 …

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 report the experimental determination of the structure and response to applied electric
field of the lower-temperature nematic phase of the previously reported calamitic compound …

A smectic liquid-crystal phase made from achiral molecules with bent cores was found to
have fluid layers that exhibit two spontaneous symmetry-breaking instabilities: polar …

Ferroelectric liquid crystals have been a major research topic since 30 years. However,
when it comes to liquid crystals, the term “ferroelectric” is strongly ambiguous and frequently …

As their name indicates, liquid crystals simultaneously exhibit some characteristics common
to both ordinary isotropic liquids and solid crystals. This ambivalence is also found in the …

Liquid crystals are partially ordered systems without a rigid, long-range structure. The study
of these materials covers a wide area: chemical structure, physical properties and technical …

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

Any polar-ordered material with a spatially uniform polarization field is internally frustrated:
The symmetry-required local preference for polarization is to be nonuniform, ie, to be locally …

Chirality has become arguably the most important and complex topic of research in liquid
crystals today. The reduced symmetry in these organized phases leads to a variety of novel …