Editors note

After a three-year break due to the pandemic time, the XII National Conference on Neutron Scattering and Complementary Methods in Investigations of Properties of Condensed Phases was held between the 20 and the 22 of June 2022. This conference was organised by the Institute of Chemical Sciences of the Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities (Siedlce, Poland), Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland), Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (Kraków, Poland) and the Polish Neutron Scattering Society. The conference has been repeatedly organised since 1997 and used to be held in the ‘Reymontówka’ Rest House for Scientists and Artists at Chlewiska near Siedlce. The venue is a manor-house, originally built for the Różański family in the middle of the 19 century. In 1926, the manor house was purchased by Aurelia, Władysław Reymont’s widow, who spent a part of her husband’s Nobel Prize Award on that. Reymont was awarded this Prize for the novel ‘The Peasants’ in 1924. The conference was aimed at providing a forum for scientists working in neutron science and complementary methods and to enhance contact between scientists from different academic and research centres in Poland. The conference gathered 23 participants from 8 scientific institutions in Kraków, Siedlce, Świerk, Warszawa and Wrocław. The scientific programme consisted of 21 lectures. The speakers focused on properties of liquid crystals and magnetic materials investigated by various experimental methods, particularly using neutron scattering. Perspectives for advanced neutron scattering experiments at the European Spallation Source (ESS) were also presented. This special issue of the Phase Transitions journal contains a selection of the reports presented during the conference. It also provides an opportunity to remember our distinguished colleague Professor Ludwik Dobrzyński, a long-time participant in these conferences. The obituary is included herein. The editors of this issue would like to thank all contributors to this volume. It is also our great pleasure to thank the Editor-in-Chief of Phase Transitions Professor Jens Kreisel and the T&F team, whose efforts and help were invaluable, starting from editorial decisions and throughout the whole production process of this volume.