Our paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (the longest running journal dedicated to science, established in 1665, with contributing authors including Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin) on defect configurations in nematic and smectic liquid crystal shells is published. You can download the paper here (free access until 31st of March). In the paper we give a brief overview to the science and possible applications of liquid crystalline shells and how they are currently produced using an elegant microfluidic technique, and we then concentrate on our own contributions that focus on the nematic-smectic A transition and the smectic A-smectic-C transition in the shells. New additions in this paper includes a description of how the director field pattern in a planar-aligned SmA shell rearranges in response to a rotation of the shell with respect to gravity, how a negative-signed defect can be produced in a nematic shell by seeding more positive-signed defects within the shell than required (and allowed, if they would not be compensated by negative defects) by topology, and how the SmA-SmC transition appears in a homeotropic-aligned shell (the picture to the left is from a SmC shell of this type).

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