Soft matter

Meer over het boek

Soft matter plays a crucial role in various technological applications and is essential in fields like chemistry, environmental science, food industry, and life sciences. Recently, the scope of soft matter science has expanded from traditional areas such as colloids and polymers to encompass biological systems, soft nanoscale materials, and innovative composites and microfluidic devices. Soft and biological materials exhibit fundamental structural and dynamic features, including diverse morphologies, non-equilibrium phenomena, self-organization, and unique flow dynamics sensitive to external fields. These characteristics arise from the cooperative interplay of numerous degrees of freedom, with correlations spanning from nanometers to millimeters and from nanoseconds to days. Advancing the field of complex soft materials necessitates several key developments: the creation of novel experimental techniques to investigate individual components and their cooperative behavior; the synthesis of complex, self-organized, and biomimetic systems with unique properties; and the exploration of advanced theoretical and computational methods that address the extensive range of time and length scales involved. Additionally, there is a need to study the structural and functional properties of soft and biological materials, focusing on self-organization, hierarchical structures, and the fluid-like behavior of biological entities. Understanding