The 2021 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize

This year sees the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize awarded for the thirteenth time and the first twelve winners are listed in Table 1. The Prize, named after the Founding Editors of the journal Liquid Crystals, Geoffrey Luckhurst and Ed Samulski, is awarded to the best paper published in that year in the Journal [1]. The dictionary definition of best is being of the highest quality, but how do we apply this definition, and select the Prizewinner from the almost three hundred papers published in the Journal in 2021? This demanding task is left to the Prize’s Selection Committee consisting of the Journal’s Editorial Board and myself as Editor. The process begins with our referees who are asked if they have reviewed a paper that would make a worthy winner of the Prize. These recommendations are collated and shared with the Selection Committee to assist in its role to draw up a longlist of nominations from which the eventual winner will be chosen. Each member can nominate as many, or as few papers as they wish from the referees’ recommendations and any other paper published that year. The papers that garner the most nominations in this stage form the shortlist to be voted upon by the members of the Selection Committee. Any member that has a paper on the shortlist is exempted from the final stage of the selection process.

Table 1. Previous winners of the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize and their authors.

Year	Authors	Title	Reference
2009	Goodby JW, Saez IM, Cowling SJ, Gasowska JS, MacDonald RA, Sia S, Watson P, Toyne KJ, Hird M, Lewis RA, Lee SE, Vaschenko V.	Molecular complexity and the control of self-organising processes.	[2]
2010	Jakli A.	Electro-mechanical effects in liquid crystals.	[3]
2011	Skarabot M, Lokar Z, Gabrijelcic K, Wilkes D, Musevic I.	Atomic force microscope based method of measuring short cholesteric pitch in liquid crystals.	[4]
2012	Picken SJ, Dingemans TJ, Madsen LA, Frascescangeli O, Samulski ET.	Uniaxial to biaxial nematic phase transition in a bent-core thermotropic liquid crystal by polarising microscopy.	[5]
2013	Pieranski P, Yang B, Burtz LJ, Camu A, Simonetti F.	Generation of umbilics by magnets and flow.	[6]
2014	Takezoe H, Araoka, F.	Polar columnar liquid crystals.	[7]
2015	Alshomrany A, Clark NA.	Fisheye lens conoscopy.	[8]
2016	Dawood AA, Grossel MC, Luckhurst GR, Richardson RM, Timimi BA, Wells NJ, Yousif YZ.	On the twist-bend nematic phase formed directly from the isotropic phase.	[9]
2017	Paterson DA, Abberly JP, Harrison WT, Storey JM, Imrie CT.	Cyanobiphenyl-based liquid crystal dimers and the twist-bend nematic phase.	[10]
2018	Tschierske C.	Mirror symmetry breaking in liquids and liquid crystals.	[11]
2019	Cruickshank E, Salamonczyk M, Pocieha D, Strachan GJ, Storey JMD, Wang C, Feng J, Zhu CH, Gorecka E, Imrie CT.	Sulfur-linked cyanobiphenyl-based liquid crystal dimers and the twist-bend nematic phase.	[12]
2020	Abberley JP, Walker R, Storey JMD, Imrie CT.	Molecular structure and the twist-bend nematic phase: the role of terminal chains	[13]

The shortlist for the 2021 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize consisted of five papers, and any one of these would have made an outstanding Prizewinner. I am delighted to announce that the 2021 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize has been awarded to Atsutaka Manabe, Matthias Bremer and Martin Kraska for their paper entitled Ferroelectric nematic phase at and below room temperature [14], and this marks the first occasion that the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize has been awarded to a group based in industry. The recently discovered ferroelectric nematic phase is probably the hottest topic in the field of liquid crystals. This paper describes the first room temperature ferroelectric nematogen to be reported and it exhibits a direct ferroelectric nematic-isotropic phase transition. The Selection Committee considered the design approach novel and exciting, and the availability of this material will accelerate not only fundamental developments in this area but also application-based research and device prototyping.

The remaining four papers on the short-list were each highly commended by the Selection Committee and most certainly merit recognition here. In strict chronological order of publication, the first of these four highly commended papers was by Wei Chen and Hiroshi Yokoyama and entitled Rapid thickness mapping of free-standing smectic films using colour information of reflected light [15]. This paper describes a practical optical method for rapid mapping of the thickness of free-standing smectic films based on the colour information of reflected light from the film. The Selection Committee viewed this as a technically outstanding piece of work, combing physics and engineering in a highly creative manner.

The next shortlisted paper entitled A hypothesis for the architecture of plant secondary cell walls, involving liquid crystalline arrays of microtubules in the cortex of the cell by John Lydon [16] covers two disparate topics: the physics of spontaneous structure-forming by liquid crystals, and the biology of plant cell walls. The Selection Committee considered this to be a tour de force bridging physics and biology in terms of liquid crystals in order to describe the factors controlling the architecture of cell walls of plants, and at the same enhances the reader’s knowledge of nematic liquid crystals. The Selection Committee viewed this pioneering paper as defining a new research direction for our community.

The final two papers on the shortlist both focussed on the ferroelectric nematic phase. The first of these by Richard Mandle, Stephen Cowling, and John Goodby entitled Structural variants of RM734 in the design of splay nematic materials [17] described the synthesis and characterisation of a wide range of new materials related in structure to the acrhetypal ferroelectric nematogen RM734, and showed that mixture formulation could be used to engineer materials having improved working temperature ranges. The Selection Committee considered this to be a hugely significant contribution to our understanding of structure-property relations in this new class of liquid crystals, and will inspire many related works concerning molecular design of ferroelectric nematogens.

The second of these papers, and the last on our shortlist, is by Nerea Sebastian, Richard Mandle, Andrej Petelin, Alexey Eremin, and Alenka Mertelj entitled Electrooptics of mm-scale polar domains in the ferroelectric nematic phase [18] and describes an in-depth study of the formation and structure of large polar domains formed by the ferroelectric nematogen RM734 in a range of differing planar cells. The Selection Committee considered this paper to be an excellent account of the fundamental behaviour of these novel materials and provides an understanding of how to control and exploit these intriguing properties in a range of technologies. This paper will certainly stimulate much further research in this rapidly developing area.

The Prizewinning article is made free to access, and all four short-listed papers have been published as open access. I would strongly encourage you all to read this collection of papers. They are beautifully written and describe research at the very leading edge of our field. I would like to thank everyone who published their work in Liquid Crystals during 2021, and the Selection Committee for all their hard work in selecting the 2021 Luckhurst-Samulski Prizewinner. The selection process for the 2022 Prize begins very soon!