Article in Liquid Crystals Reviews

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