Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an excellent review of the history and physics of the SmC* phase, with an emphasis on the lyotropic version on it, discovered by the authors. The review is well written and can be published after some minor corrections.

The authors should stress what they expect in terms of possible practical implications of the lyotropic SmC*. It does not look likely it can be used in electro-optical devices, but perhaps the authors can point to some parallels with microbiological systems; the current emphasis on thermotropic-lyotropic mirroring is good but a bit narrow.  The first sentence ends with "revised" which means "corrected" or "altered"; my guess the authors meant "reviewed" All the references to figures must be fixed, as the text shows warnings "Reference source not found" in practically every paragraph.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your evaluation!

To underline the practical implications of the discovery and investigation of the lyo-SmC* phase we now added an additional paragraph in the conclusions section. As suggested we exchanged the word “revised” with “reviewed” and turned the automatic cross references to figure numbers into manual ones.

Reviewer 2 Report

Obviously you have done a very complete review of the literature.  I found the   provided  discussion about what could be the cause of the inter-layer communication that allows the SmC* analog to appear very interesting and well supported 

I have no comments for improvement,  and recommend the manuscript for publication. 

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his kind appraisal.