Soft Matter
Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications
I. Challenges, Relevance & Fun of Soft Matter
The additional material is organized according to book sections and it includes links to (review) papers mentioned in the book, videos of different phenomena we discuss (experiments and simulations), as well as links to online lectures that address certain topics in more details.
I.1 Inspiration from an example
- Perrin, J. (1909). ‘Mouvement brownien et molécules’. J. Phys. Theor. Appl. 9
- Prévost, C., M. Takahashi, and R. Lavery (2009). ‘Deforming DNA: From Physics to Biology’, Chem Phys Chem 10, pp. 1399–140
- Deniz, A. A., S. Mukhopadhyay, and E. A Lemke (2007). ‘Single-molecule biophysics: At the interface of biology, physics and chemistry’, J. R. Soc. Interface 5
An MIT Lecture on the science of cornstarch
Fun with Non-Newtonian fluids ULamar
- Bonn, D., M. M. Denn, L. Berthier, T. Divoux, and S. Manneville (2017). ‘Yield stress materials in soft condensed matter’. In: Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, p. 2017
- Berthier, L., G. Biroli, J.-P. Bouchaud, L. Cipelletti, and W. van Saarloos, eds. (2011). Dynamical Heterogeneities in Glasses, Colloids and Granular Media, Oxford University Press
- Jaeger, H. M., S. R., Nagel, and R. P. Behringer (1996). ‘Granular solids, liquids, and gases’, Rev. Mod. Phys. 68
- Pedley, T. J. and J. O. Kessler (1992). ‘Hydrodynamic phenomena in suspensions of swimming microorganisms’, Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 24
Lecture by Sharon Glotzer on “Entropy driven order of hard core objects”
I.2 Our view of soft matter and approach
- Phillip Anderson “Basic notions of Condensed Matter Physics
- Brenner, M. P., P. Sörensen, and D. Weitz (2020). Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, From Homemade to Haute Cuisine. W. W. Norton
- Mathijssen, J. T. M. et al., Culinary fluid mechanics and other currents in food science, Rev. Mod. Phys. 95, 025004 (2023).
- Lohse, D. and X. Zhang (2020). ‘Physicochemical hydrodynamics of droplets out of equilibrium’. In: Nat. Rev. Phys. 2, pp. 426–443
- Lohse, D. (2022). ‘Fundamental fluid dynamics challenges in inkjet printing’. In: Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 54
- Aleandri, S. and R. Mezzenga (2020). ‘The physics of lipidic mesophase delivery systems’. Phys. Today 73(7), pp. 38–44
- Poon, W. C. K. et al. (2020). ‘Soft matter science and the COVID-19 pandemic”, Soft Matter 16, pp. 8310–8324
Interesting general links
- For an overview of the emergence of Soft Matter as a field in the 20th century, see the 2004 article Soft Condensed Matter by M. Cates.
- The 1999 article Insights from soft condensed matter by Tom Witten still contains a nice essay-type overview of the field.
- The 2019 website The era of soft matter also gives an interesting brief general characterisation of the field.
- The website Living Histories of the American Physical Societies contains many personal personal reflections on historical events, including several on the history of soft matter and biological physics.
- Many wonderful and intriguing images of soft matter can be found on the website Gallery of Soft Matter of the American Physical Society.