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Liquid crystals fill the symmetry gap between the highest-symmetry homogenous and isotropic fluid phase and the lowest-symmetry crystalline lattices. As such they are ideal materials to probe fundamental concepts relating symmetry and conservation laws to generalized elastic distortions, broken-symmetry dynamics, and topological defects. This talk reviews how nematic and smectic phases illuminated these concepts.
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T. C. Lubensky (2011) studied this question.
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