Editorial

Dear colleagues,

With the summer break already nearing its end again, it seems to be the right time to publish the next issue of Liquid Crystals Today, to get everyone back into the mood for teaching and research. Our research article is again written by one of the 2018 Glenn Brown Award prize winners, and covers the structures and properties of light responsive liquid crystals, also pointing out their importance as stimuli responsive soft matter employed in a range of possible applications. The paper is written by Dae-Yoon Kim from Material Science at MIT and describes new aspects of materials undergoing cis-trans isomerisation.

We then have two conference reports, firstly, about a multidisciplinary meeting on Smart Materials, held in the end of last year in Paris, where I organised and chaired a symposium on Liquid Crystals. The meeting itself was largely concerned with different aspects of graphene, so that the liquid crystal and soft matter related talks also covered mainly topics around lyotropic liquid crystalline order from graphene oxide and other colloidal nanoparticles.

The second conference report summarises the highlights of the annual British Liquid Crystal Society conference, which this year was held in Leeds, expertly organised by Mamatha Nagaraj and Cliff Jones. In my opinion a really interesting conference with an international audience and a half-day additional symposium on lyotropic liquid crystals, which, rightly so, was also very well attended. But read it for yourself.

At last, as in most issues of our journal, we have the most recent Research News from literature, accumulated also by Mamatha Nagaraj.

Happy reading, and have a great remainder of the summer,

With best wishes,

Ingo