The 2012 Luckhurst–Samulski Prize

The Luckhurst–Samulski Prize was first announced in 2009 [1] and is awarded annually for the best paper published each year in Liquid Crystals. The Prize is named after Geoffrey Luckhurst and Ed Samulski, not only in honour of their roles as Founder Editors of the Journal, but also to mark their outstanding contributions to liquid crystal science. What is meant by the best paper, and how do you select it from the 170 or so papers published every year in Liquid Crystals? This is clearly a demanding and subjective challenge. The exhaustive selection process begins with the referees who read the papers in greater detail than most. As part of the refereeing process, a referee can flag a paper as a worthy Prize winner and this is brought to the attention of the Selection Committee, consisting of the Editorial Board and Editors. The decision rests, however, with the Selection Committee and each member can nominate any number of papers for the Prize. These nominations make up the long list from which those receiving the most nominations are taken forward to a shortlist. Each Selection Committee member then votes for the best paper from this shortlist. The first three winners of the Prize have described quite different areas of liquid crystal science. [2–4] The inaugural winner of the Luckhurst–Samulski Prize for 2009 was John Goodby and his colleagues for their paper entitled Molecular complexity and the control of self-organising processes. [5] In 2010, the Prize was awarded to Antal Jákli for his paper entitled Electro-mechanical effects in liquid crystals. [6] The 2011 Prize, selected from a shortlist of five articles, [7–11] was awarded to Igor Muševič and his colleagues for their paper entitled Atomic force microscope based method of measuring short cholesteric pitch in liquid crystals. [9] For the second year running, the long list for the 2012 Prize consisted of papers from every issue of the Journal published last year reflecting the high quality of the papers appearing in Liquid Crystals. From this long list the Selection Committee selected seven papers for the shortlist and any one of them would have made an outstanding winner of the Prize. I am delighted to report that the 2012 Luckhurst– Samulski Prize has been awarded to Stephen Picken and his colleagues for their paper entitled Uniaxial to biaxial nematic phase transition in a bent-core thermotropic liquid crystal by polarising microscopy. [12] Geoffrey Luckhurst announced this outcome and presented the Prize to Professor Picken and his colleagues at a ceremony held at the 12th European Conference on Liquid Crystals held in Rhodes, Greece (Figure 1). In their paper, the authors describe how the optical textures of a nematic phase can be used to distinguish between the uniaxial and biaxial phase symmetry. It is suggested that the appearance of a second Schlieren texture is indicative of a biaxial nematic phase. The Selection Committee felt that this is an exciting and potentially very important discovery. The remaining six articles were highly commended by the Selection Committee, and these are, in strict chronological order, first the paper by Hashim and her colleagues entitled Nature-like synthetic alkyl branched-chain glycolipids: a review on chemical structure and self-assembly properties. [13] This review contains important insights into structure–property relationship in glycolipids with branched hydrophobic chains. This is a unique review drawing widely from sources not normally associated with liquid crystals research and is particularly interesting in terms of biomimetic chemistry. The second of these papers was by Basu, Rosenblatt and Lemieux entitled Chiral induction in thioester and oxoester liquid crystals by dispersed carbon nanotubes [14] and describes a fascinating study of how multi-walled carbon nanotubes when dispersed in low concentrations in achiral liquid crystals result in the observation of chiral signatures in the liquid crystals. In the third of these papers by Clark and colleagues entitled Alignment of the columnar liquid crystal phase of nano-DNA by confinement in channels,[15] the authors describe an important study of the alignment of lyotropic materials and report the fascinating observation that the director is perpendicular to the sidewalls of the channels. This study provides insights Liquid Crystals, 2013 Vol. 40, No. 11, 1443–1445, http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/02678292.2013. 857447