In this talk I will present my memories of a four-decade long connection, both professional and personal with Professor Lech Longa. I will focus on the primary ways this connection developed and grew: visits I made to the Jagiellonian University, visits he made to Kent State University (including a year-long Fulbright Fellowship), and two sets of biennial conferences we both attended, namely...
The discovery of the twist-bend nematic phase (NTB) can be considered as one of the most significant recent achivements in the field of liquid crystals. In the NTB phase the director is tilted at constant angle θ and forms a heliconical structure with nanoscale pitch which appears despite the achiral structure of the constituent molecules. From the general soft matter point of view the NTB...
Confined nematic liquid crystals are characterized by the interplay of ordering, elasticity, chirality, confinement, surface anchoring, external fields, flows, and activity that leads to numerous complex static and dynamic structures, including singular topological defects and nonsingular solitonic deformations. Increasing interest in active soft matter stimulated us to analyze topological...
