I was honored to be awarded the Remarkable-Achievement-Award from the Japanese Liquid Crystal Society (JLCS) on the occasion of the Annual Conference of JLCS held at Osaka University in 2013, September 8-10. The reason for the award is the remarkable achievement in molecular thermodynamic studies on liquid crystals and the outstanding contributions for a long time to promote advances in JLCS. I am most grateful that the importance of calorimetric researches has been highly appreciated by JLCS.
I started thermodynamic investigation of liquid crystals just before Kelker and Scheurle discovered the so-called room-temperature liquid crystal MBBA in 1969. Most researches concerning liquid crystals have been performed in the temperature regions where liquid crystal phases appear. However, appearance of a liquid crystalline state is governed by thermodynamic state functions reflecting the thermal history from absolute zero temperature. Therefore, we always used to measure heat capacity of liquid crystalline materials from low temperature. The first liquid crystal (LC) material that we chose for heat capacity measurement was a nematogen OHMBBA and we found a glassy state of its nematic state. My first paper in the field of liquid crystal reporting the discovery of gglassy liquid crystalh was appreciated by Prof. Chandrasekhar of Raman Research Institute at Bangalore in India and he invited me to the International Liquid Crystal Conference held in 1973 in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Raman Research Institute. Following the glassy LC, we extended calorimetric investigations to discotic LC, reentrant LC, antiferroelectric LC, metal complex LC, cubic LC, and lyotropic LC.
On the occasion of the 1973 conference at Bangalore, I was acquainted with Prof. Janik of Polish Academy of Sciences. Our proposal to the gScientific and Technological Cooperation Joint-Projecth was accepted in 1999 by the Government of the Republic of Poland and the Government of Japan. Based on this project, active collaborations of liquid crystal researches have been developed till now between the Research Center of Osaka University and the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, at Kraków.
The calorimetric studies of liquid crystals have been performed by collaborations with many colleagues, coworkers and students. On this occasion, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all those collaborators and share the present honor with all the people concerned.
