soft-matter

Research Soft Materials This research focuses on the properties of common soft materials. We study colloids, emulsions, drops, polymers and gels. Our focus is on understanding the structure of these materials and how this controls their dynamics and properties. We make extensive use of the experimental tools of a soft matter physics lab, including optical...

Research Soft Materials This research focuses on the properties of common soft materials. We study colloids, emulsions, drops, polymers and gels. Our focus is on understanding the structure of these materials and how this controls their dynamics and properties. We make extensive use of the experimental tools of a soft matter physics lab, including optical...

Resources Microrheology What is Microrheology? Complex fluids like mayonaise, complex materials like plastics, and biomaterials like cells are all somewhat squishy. To some degree, these materials can act both like fluids and like solids, depending on how you put forces on them. Conventional rheology is a way to measure the squishiness of materials: how viscous...

Can a solid flow? What would that even look like? Researchers explored these questions with an ultra-soft gel (think 100,000 times softer than a gummy bear) pumped through a ring-shaped annular pipe. Despite its elasticity — that tendency to return to an original shape that distinguishes solids from fluids — the gel does flow. But […]

Scientific discovery doesn’t always require a high-tech laboratory or a hefty budget. Many people have a first-rate lab right in their own homes – their kitchen. The kitchen offers plenty of opportunities to view and explore what physicists call soft matter and complex fluids. Everyday phenomena, such as Cheerios clustering in milk or rings left when drops of coffee evaporate, have led to discove…

Conjugated polymers (CPs) are transformative materials that have facilitated numerous advancements in the field of soft-matter electronics. Their low-cost, high structural tunability, and robust mechanical properties have made them desirable materials for broad range of applications, including in energy capture and storage, chemical and biological sensors, electronic skin, and electronic display …

Soft Matter is excited to announce an open call for submissions to themed collection on ‘Food as soft matter’ Guest Edited by Associate Professor Vivek Sharma (University of Illinois Chicago, USA), this themed collection invites contributions in form of articles, communications, reviews and perspectives aimed at understanding and analysing food as soft matter and molecular […]

Charles Dhong is currently an Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering at University of Delaware. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University followed by postdoctoral studies at University of California, San Diego. His research group is interested in measuring or controlling the mechanical forces at biological interfaces. Biological interfaces, ranging from cells [&…

Alexandra Zidovska is an Associate Professor of Physics at the Center for Soft Matter Research in the Physics Department at New York University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara after she completed her undergraduate studies and M.Sc. at Technical University of Munich, Germany. She pursued her postdoctoral studies at Harvard […]

American Physics Society (APS) March meeting is one of the largest physics meetings in the world. In 2022, the meeting will take place in Chicago. To help the community quickly catch up on the work presented in this conference, Paper Digest Team processed all accepted papers, and generated one highlight sentence (typically the main topic) for each paper. Readers are encouraged to read these machi…

Do you know an early-career researcher who deserves recognition for their contribution to the soft matter field?   Soft Matter is pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for its 2022 Lectureship award and will close on 31 December 2021. This annual award was established in 2009 to honour an early-stage career scientist who has […]

Andela is an Associate Professor of Biological and Soft Matter Physics and University College London. She is leading a computational group at the intersection of soft matter physics and life sciences. Her research is focused on understanding molecular self-organisation far from thermodynamic equilibrium: how macromolecules self-organise into functional machines that produce work underpinning life…

Jiajia Zhou received his BSc in physics from Peking University in 2002. He then went to Canada and finished his PhD in physics from McMaster University in 2010, under the supervision of Prof. An-Chang Shi. He was a postdoctoral researcher from 2011 to 2015 at University Mainz in Germany with Prof. Friederike Schmid. He joined […]

It is with great pleasure that we announce Prof Silvia Marchesan (University of Trieste) as the recipient of the 2021 Soft Matter lectureship. This award, now in its thirteenth year, honours an early-career researcher who has made significant contribution to the soft matter field. The recipient is selected by the Soft Matter Editorial Board from a list […]

At the beginning of December, the Soft Matter: Young Investigators Meeting was held (virtually); organised for the soft matter community in India by Susmita Dash, Aloke Kumar, Basavaraja Gurappa and Dillip Satapathy. Soft Matter Associate Editor Sanat Kumar gave a keynote talk on how problem solving has defined his career and provided valuable insights for […]

Equilibrium and Beyond-Equilibrium Self-Organization in Soft Materials: The goal of the symposium is to bring together scientists different fields and with different expertise to identify analogies between diverse phenomena to build general principles about the self-organization of soft matter at, and, far-from-equilibrium. The symposium will be highly interdisciplinary and will encourage discuss…

Colm P. Kelleher is a postdoc at Harvard University specializing in biophysics and soft matter physics. As well as research, Colm is interested in science communication and education. In this article, he writes about about the importance of mentors and role models in his scientific life. The post Debts and Lessons (in Science) appeared first on Civic Science Media Lab .

The Edwards Symposium series is a series of annual conferences on soft matter research areas, run as a collaboration between the Turing Gateway to Mathematics, Unilever and the Edwards Centre for Soft Matter. This year’s symposium focused on microscale fluid dynamics, jamming and flow, soft interfaces and responsive and programmable soft matter. One hundred delegates attended […]

The Soft Matter Lectureship is an annual award that honours an early-career researcher for their significant contribution to the soft matter field. The recipient is selected by the Soft Matter Editorial Board from a list of candidates nominated by the community.

10-12 May, 2017, University of Luxembourg Soft Matter is pleased to support Twisted, a two-day conference on the physics, chemistry and applications of cholesteric lyotropic liquid crystals developing in colloidal suspensions of chiral nanorods. The motivation for the conference is the rapidly growing interest in liquid crystals formed by nanocrystals of cellulose or chitin, filamentous viruses, …