At the end of last year, it was announced that Professors Corrie Imrie, John Storey and Bill Harrsion, and PhD students Daniel Paterson and Jordan Abberley, were named the Luckhurst-Samulski prize winners for 2017.
This annual prize, first awarded in 2009, is given for the best paper published that year in the journal Liquid Crystals and has rapidly become a major prize in the field of liquid crystals science and technology.
The paper by the Aberdeen group was selected by the journal’s Editorial Board from the 230 papers published in Liquid Crystals in 2017.
In making the announcement in an editorial in the Journal, the founding editors Professors Luckhurst and Samulskiwrote that the winning paper describes a particularly important aspect of structure-property relationships for the twist-bend nematic phase, one of the hottest topics in liquid crystal science of recent years. This novel phase has a helical, chiral structure despite being comprised of achiral molecules, and the significant and highly intriguing experimental data presented in the Aberdeen paper will now present a demanding challenge to theoreticians and other experimentalists alike to better understand this fascinating state of matter.