Liquid Crystals as Inspirations for Fundamental Physics

Abstract

Liquid crystals fill the symmetry gap between the highest-symmetry homogenous and isotropic fluid phase and the lowest-symmetry crystalline lattices. As such they are ideal materials to probe fundamental concepts relating symmetry and conservation laws to generalized elastic distortions, broken-symmetry dynamics, and topological defects. This talk reviews how nematic and smectic phases illuminated these concepts.

Keywords:

• Elasticity
• hydrodynamics
• symmetry of liquid crystal phases
• topological defects

Acknowledgment

This article is a review of many things to which more people have contributed than I can acknowledge in the limited spaced provided here. I thank them all. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants NSF-DMR-0520020 and NSF-DMR-0804900 (TCL).