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George Cordoyiannis, in collaboration with J. Thoen and C. Glorieux (KU Leuven, Belgium), P. Losada-Pérez (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium), I. Lelidis (University of Athens, Greece), and C.S.P. Tripathi (Banaras Hindu University, India), has published a review article entitled “The Halperin-Lubensky-Ma argument on the nature of the liquid-crystalline nematic-to-smectic A phase transition: what we have learnt from experiments over the past 50 years” in Liquid Crystals Reviews. This article comprehensively reviews half century of experiments that aimed to detect the fluctuation-induced weakly-first-order character of the nematic-to-smectic A (N-SmA) phase transition in liquid crystals, based on the Halperin-Lubensky-Ma (HLM) argument. High-resolution calorimetric and optical birefringence studies, including some conducted by the authors of this work, exhibit remarkable scaling consistent with the HLM predictions. This experimental demonstration of HLM in liquid crystals is of major importance for a wide range of physical systems, from superconductors to quantum chromodynamics, in which fluctuation-induced first-order transitions occur.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21680396.2025.2602170
 

The journal Nature Reviews Physics has published a review article entitled “Platforms for the realization and characterization of Tomonaga–Luttinger liquids”. In the article, a colleague from the department, Martin Klanjšek, together with an international group of collaborators, provides an overview of the field of physics that has developed over the past two decades based on the theoretical concept of the Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid. The concept describes the physics of interacting quantum particles in one dimension, where, compared to the more common case of three dimensions, the role of interactions is so strong that it leads to very unusual collective behavior, which is, however, entirely universal, applying equally to fermions, bosons, and anyons. The article demonstrates how this concept has proven successful in describing experimental results in such diverse systems as organic conductors, carbon nanotubes, quantum wires, topological edge states in quantum spin Hall insulators, Josephson junctions, Bose liquids in nanocapillaries, and quantum spin chains and ladders.

Link to the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-025-00866-w