Reseña del libro "structure and properties of liquid crystals (en Inglés)"
liquid crystals have found an important place in modern life. just look around: we see them in our clocks, computer displays, tv screens, telephones and calculators, car dashboards, photo-cameras, etc. other applications include slide projection systems, spatial light modulators, temperature sensors and even liquid crystal lasers. in all these technical innovations, which appeared over the life of only a single generation, liquid crystals occupy a key position. the army of people working in the liquid crystal field continues to grow. the first conferences held during the early part of the last century involved only tens of participants; then, later, a few hundreds. more recently a wide river of principal liquid crystal conferences has given rise to several subsidiary, but also quite broad streams of meetings: worldwide conferences, european conferences, conferences of national liquid crystal societies, separate conferences on chemistry (sometimes only on chirality problems), optics, photonics and ferroelectricity of liquid crystals. each of such meetings attracts hundreds of participants, but of different profiles: chemists, physicists, engineers for radio- and optoelectronics, biologists and physicians. in recent years a group of several excellent top-level books have been published on the physics of liquid crystals (e.g., de gennes (1975), vertogen & de jeu (1988), de gennes & prost (1995), shri singh (2002)) and many others, dealing with particular problems related to physics of liquid crystals, . popular books on liquid crystals are very scarce; i can only mention an often cited, a piece of art prepared by a.s. sonin (1980) (in russian), a slightly more scientific book written for schoolboys by pikin and blinov (1982) (in russian and spanish) and a nice, philosophically tinted book by p. collings (1990). evidently, there is a huge gap between the first group of books and the second. the mentioned monographs have been written by theoreticians at a very high level using the advanced mathematical apparatus of modern physics. the popular books are written vividly without a single formula. but what about the intermediate levels? this is the gap i would like to try to fill. the book proposed to bridge the gap has been written by an experimentalist who, through all his life, has tried to understand and explain to his students the complexity of liquid crystal physics using either simple analogies or going back to the very first principles we have studied in middle and high schools. in this book there is no sentence starting with it is easy to show?.; either it has been shown, or explained by simple analogy. in fact i only use mathematics at the level of engineering high school. in those cases when i need something more (for example, the fourier transform, tensor algebra or variation calculus) i carefully explain all the details. in addition there are about 300 drawings clarifying the text. the book consists of three parts: structure, physical properties, and electro-optics of liquid crystals. its aim is modest: it is to introduce to a reader the most important ideas related to the structure and physical properties of liquid crystals, including some of the theoretical aspects. the book is intended for a wide spectrum of scientists, including experimental physicists, physical chemists, engineers, and especially, for undergraduate students and phd students.
