The 2013 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize

The Luckhurst-Samulski Prize was announced 5 years ago [1] and is awarded annually to the best paper published in Liquid Crystals in that year.[2–5] The first four winners of the Prize are listed in Table 1, and these have described quite different areas of liquid crystal science.[6–9]

Table 1. Previous winners of the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize.

Year	Authors	Title	References
2009	Goodby JW, Saez IM, Cowling SJ, Gasowska JS, MacDonald RA, Sia S, Watson P, Toyne KJ, Hird M, Lewis RA, Lee S-E, Vaschenko V	Molecular complexity and the control of self-organising processes	[6]
2010	Jákli A.	Electro-mechanical effects in liquid crystals	[7]
2011	Škarabot M, Lokar Ž, Gabrijelčič K, Wilkes D, Muševič I	Atomic force microscope based method of measuring short cholesteric pitch in liquid crystals	[8]
2012	Picken SJ, Dingemans TJ, Madsen LA, Francescangeli O, Samulski ET	Uniaxial to biaxial nematic phase transition in a bent-core thermotropic liquid crystal by polarising microscopy	[9]

The challenge of selecting the best paper from almost 200 papers published in 2013 was a particularly demanding one. The exhaustive selection process begins with the referees who, as part of the reviewing process, can flag a paper as a worthy prizewinner. These suggestions are brought to the attention of the Selection Committee, consisting of the Editorial Board and Editor, with whom the decision rests to compile a long list from which the prizewinner is eventually chosen. Each member of the Selection Committee can nominate any number of papers at this stage. These nominations are compiled into a long list and those receiving the most nominations are taken forward to a short list. Each Selection Committee member then votes for what they consider to be the best paper from this short list.

For the third year running, the long list for the 2013 Prize consisted of papers from every issue of the Journal published last year reflecting the high quality of the papers appearing in Liquid Crystals. For the 2012 Prize, the winner by Picken and co-workers [9] was selected from a shortlist containing six other papers.[10–15] This year the shortlist contained eight papers, and any one of these eight would have made an outstanding winner of the Prize.

I am delighted to report that the 2013 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize has been awarded to Pawel Pieranski and his colleagues for their paper entitled Generation of umbilics by magnets and flows.[16] Geoffrey Luckhurst announced this decision and presented the Prize to Professor Pieranski at a ceremony held at the 25th International Liquid Crystal Conference held in Dublin, Ireland (Figure 1). This paper differs from the others on this year’s shortlist, and indeed from the previous prizewinners, by being essentially pedagogical and as such was considered by the Selection Committee to make an important contribution to our subject. The paper demonstrates beautifully the generation of defects in liquid crystals, their interactions with external fields and the visualisation of magnetic fields by means of liquid crystals. It is an absolute pleasure to read and will clearly advance our understanding of a fascinating element of liquid crystal behaviour. I would strongly encourage everybody, irrespective of their scientific background, to read this paper.

Figure 1. (colour online) Geoffrey Luckhurst (left) presenting Pawel Pieranski (centre) with the 2013 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize, and the Editor Corrie Imrie (right).

The remaining seven articles were highly commended by the Selection Committee, and these are, in strict chronological order, first the paper by Shamid and Allender entitled Landau theory-based estimates for viscosity coefficients of uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals [17] which describes the derivation of very compact expressions for all the viscosity coefficients of the biaxial nematic phase in terms of uniaxial and biaxial order parameters using the one tensor approach in the Landau-de Gennes theory. These expressions are more convenient to use in theory than the ones obtained recently using the two-tensor approach. The Selection Committee considered this to be an important contribution to the field and that these expressions will be used by other authors in the applications of the general theory.

The second of these papers by Yamamoto and colleagues entitled Lattice plane control of liquid crystal blue phase [18] describes a study of the alignment behaviour of blue phases. These phases have considerable application potential in display applications arising from the combination of a strong Kerr effect with the optical isotropy in the field-off state. It is clear, however, that the alignment of these phases does play an important role in their electro-optic performance. The Selection Committee considered this paper to be an important advance in our understanding of the alignment behaviour of blue phases.

The third of these papers by Sadashiva and co-workers entitled Apolar novel mesogenic symmetric dimers composed of five-ring bent-core monomeric units [19] reports the synthesis and characterisation of novel liquid crystal dimers containing bent-core mesogenic units. Many of the reported dimers show two orthogonal lamellar phases that differ from one another only in their layer spacing. This surprising observation has been attributed to conformational changes within the molecules. This work was considered to be a significant contribution to our understanding of structure property relationships in this class of materials.

The fourth of these papers by Cui and Lemieux entitled Ferroelectric liquid crystals with axially chiral 2,2′-spirobiindan-1,1′-dione cores [20] describes the synthesis and characterisation of a new homologous series of axially chiral materials which all exhibit the ferroelectric smectic C phase. The values of the spontaneous polarisation measured in these phases are considerably higher than those previously reported in the literature for axially chiral materials. This paper was considered to be a significant contribution to our understanding of the correlations between structure and ferroelectric properties.

The fifth paper by Nobili and colleagues entitled Dispersion and orientation of single-walled carbon nanotubes in a chromonic liquid crystal [21] describes an inventive technique for dispersing carbon nanotubes in liquid crystals based on the use of nematic chromonic liquid crystals. The authors have studied these dispersions and have found the surprising result that the ordering of the carbon nanotubes in the host is remarkably high even close to the nematic–isotropic transition. The Selection Committee considered this work to be a particularly important contribution to this rapidly growing area.

The sixth paper by Jákli and co-workers entitled Cryo-TEM studies of two smectic phases of an asymmetric bent-core material [22] reported for the first time the observation of screw and edge dislocations, twist grain boundaries and small-angle and large-angle tilt grain boundaries in the smectic phase of 100 nm thick samples. The paper contains some beautiful images of the phases studied. This was viewed by the Selection Committee as a particularly important contribution to our understanding of the properties of mesophases formed by bent-core mesogens.

The final paper on the shortlist by Yi and Clark entitled Orientation of chromonic liquid crystals by topographic linear channels: multi-stable alignment and tactoid structure [23] describes an extensive study of how to control the alignment of chromonic liquid crystals and the effect of alignment layers on their structure. Chromonic liquid crystals have considerable application potential in a range of biological applications, but achieving their uniform alignment remains a demanding challenge. The Selection Committee considered that this paper is a significant contribution to our understating of how to meet this challenge.

I would like to thank everybody who has published their work in Liquid Crystals in 2013 and the Selection Committee for their hard work in choosing the winner of the 2013 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize. The Journal continues to thrive and received a record number of submissions last year. I am particularly pleased to announce that for the fifth year in succession the impact factor for Liquid Crystals increased and now, for the first time in the Journal’s history, is over 2. The 2013 impact factor is 2.349. This is a tremendous outcome and I would like to thank the whole liquid crystals community for its continued and enthusiastic support for the Journal.

Corrie T Imrie

Department of Chemistry, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

Email: [email protected]