Editorial

Dear colleagues,

As you will already know, two of our colleagues, Prof Sergey Pikin and Dr Sofia Torgova have passed recently, and will leave a void in our community, their families and their circle of friends.

Sergey Pikin was an outstanding theoretical physicist, and I had the pleasure to witness his research stays at the University of Darmstadt, where we both worked in the group of Wolfgang Haase in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are all aware of the seminal work of Sergey over many decades.

Sofia Torgova was one of the founding members and very engaged in the Russian Liquid Crystal Society. She is well known for her synthetic work, producing liquid crystal materials, often for applications and especially displays.

In this issue of LC Today you will find obituaries for both, written by colleagues and friends. Earlier in the year we had the ‘Texture of the Year’ competition for the best texture of 2023 as voted for by the members of the society. Now, we have an article which provides a bit more information and background of the material and the texture, provided by Marceline Thornton. A further short paper by Yuriy Garbovskiy is more of historical interest, describing the most likely first synthesis of a liquid crystalline material in the United States, already as early as 1902.

A conference report of the 50^th German Liquid Crystal Conference provides you with some insight about the news and research achievements of the last year in Germany, this year with a strong component from the Netherlands.

Following is a short report on a public engagement session here in Manchester under the umbrella of the ‘Pint of Science’ events of their annual worldwide May festival. This is followed as usual by the latest research news.

As we are now coming to the end of the academic year and the begin of the conference season, all that is left for me is to wish you a relaxing and nice holiday, and I hope to see you all at the ILCC in Rio de Janeiro in July.

With best wishes,

Ingo Dierking