This issue of Phase Transitions contains papers from the XX Polish-Czech Seminar ‘Structural and Ferroelectric Phase Transitions’ held in Ustroń, south Poland. To ensure the high publication standard mandated by Phase Transitions, every submitted manuscript was reviewed by two referees before it was accepted for publication.
Roughly 100 participants from seven countries attended the twentieth in this series of seminars. The Seminar retained the informal nature of the previous ones, with a single session format and adequate time for discussion of each presentation. The meeting included 23 oral presentations and more than 70 posters. We would like to thank all of the participants of the XX Polish-Czech Seminar ‘Structural and Ferroelectric Phase Transitions’, in particular the contributors to this issue and referees.
We are deeply indebted to the Phase Transitions editorial and publishing team for giving us the opportunity to publish the papers of the Seminar and for the journal's commitment to the physics of ferroelectrics.
The idea of regular scientific meetings of physicists involved in the studies of ferroelectrics in Poland and Czechoslovakia was born in the discussion between Bożena Hilczer and Jan Fousek, the heads of research groups in Poznań and Prague, who had been successfully collaborating for years. The history of this series of seminars began in 1979 in Błażejewko (near Poznań), where the first meeting took place. All the Seminars have been organized by collaborating scientists from the Dielectric Department of the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences before 1990) and the Ferroelectric Lab of the Institute of Molecular Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences by turn, in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) and Poland.
The program of the Seminar covers a wide spectrum of topics and experimental methods used in the study of variety of ferroelectric and related materials, such as multiferroic and ferroelectric perovskites, simple and complex single crystals and ceramics, relaxor ferroelectrics, composites, new types of ferroelectric and antiferroelectric liquid crystals, ferroelastic superprotonic conductors, and many others.
The XX Polish-Czech Seminar was dedicated to our esteemed colleagues, teachers, and friends Milada Glogarová and Jan Petzelt as a token of gratitude for their important contribution to many areas of the physics of ferroelectrics.