Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications
Soft matter community
This is a mailing list where members can share information related to soft condensed matter, i.e., on all the topics covered in the book. You can also find job postings, meeting announcements, and other items of interest to the soft matter community.
This is a Statistical Physics Community mailing list where you receive a weakly email with a summary of offered posts, conferences, meeting announcements etc, most relevant for the soft matter community. There is some content overlap with the Soft matter mailing list.
The Gordon Research Conferences provide an international platform for discussion of frontier research in the biological, chemical, physical and engineering sciences and their interfaces. Once in two years a meeting on Soft Matter is organized.
The Lorentz Center is a workshop center that hosts international scientific meetings of typically one week. The workshops are characterized by an open and interactive atmosphere and their high scientific quality. You can often find workshops relevant for the Soft and Bio Matter community. The Lorentz Center is open to interesting proposals from around the world, also from early and mid career scientists.
This is a multi and interdisciplinary centre where physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, mathematicians, biologists, students and researchers from all over the world are brought together, under one roof, to work together to solve the most challenging questions posed by nature, to discover the underlying structures across the sciences and to strive for the unity of knowledge. There are interesting programs throughout a year relevant for the Soft and Bio Matter community. You can also find recorded talks of past workshops on their Youtube channel (an impressive +7k videos), some of which we link to in our Resources accompanying chapters part of the website.
Every two years a Statistical Physics conference is organized somewhere in the world. In 2025 it was in Florence. The website link changes each year.
This annual summer school for graduate students in soft matter and statistical physics is hosted by the Physics Department at UMass Amherst. The idea of the school is to offer training and courses in basic techniques commonly used by the research areas of liquid crystals, granular matter, solid mechanics, polymeric and colloidal physics and micro-fluidics, as well as biophysics, that are not thought in standard curriculum.
For more than 70 years, the École de Physique des Houches has welcomed young physicists from all over the world who come to acquire and perfect their scientific knowledge in a magnificent setting at the foot of the Mont Blanc mountain range. Often the thematic of the summer school is relevant for Soft and Bio Matter research.
CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) promotes fundamental research on advanced computational methods and their application to important problems in frontier areas of science and technology. They organize workshops that are relevant for Soft and Bio Matter research, as well as seminar series that are broadcasted on zoom. The upcoming program can be found here.
The Isaac Newton Institute is a national and international visitor research institute. It runs research programmes on selected themes in mathematics and the mathematical sciences with applications over a wide range of science and technology. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from the UK and overseas to interact in research over an extended period.
The aim of the LMC conference is to bring together scientists working on the liquid state of matter. This rapidly growing field includes the physics, chemistry, biology, and chemical engineering of liquid matter as well as various applied research areas in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries. The twelfth (2024) Liquid Matter Conference will take place at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. Previous conferences were held in Lyon (1990), Firenze (1993), Norwich (1996), Grenada (1999), Konstanz (2002), Utrecht (2005), Lund (2008), Vienna (2011), Lisbon (2014), Ljubljana (2017) and virtual (2021). This series of meetings is organized by the Liquids Section of the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society.
The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics was founded in Vienna, Austria, in 1992. The Institute runs four to six thematic programs each year, selected about two years in advance on the basis of the advice of the International ESI Scientific Advisory Board. Further more it organizes workshops and schools. You can often find programs relevant for the Soft and Bio Matter research.
KITP hosts 2-4 month focused research programs on different topics including ones relevant for Soft and Bio Matter community.
This is a website devoted to interactive simulations demonstrating self-assembly – particles organizing themselves into different structures. It can be used to simulate the behavior of a box full of particles, and observe how they form gases, liquids, and crystals depending on their density and temperature of the system.
HOOMD-blue is a general-purpose particle simulation toolkit, made and maintained by the Glotzer Group @ UMichigan, implements molecular dynamics and hard particle Monte Carlo that are optimized for fast execution on both GPUs and CPUs. As a Python package, HOOMD-blue gives the flexibility to create custom initialization routines, control simulation parameters, perform in situ analysis, use interactive notebooks, and more.
oxDNA is a simulation code originally developed to implement the coarse-grained DNA model introduced by T. E. Ouldridge, J. P. K. Doye and A. A. Louis. It has been reworked since and it is now an extensible simulation+analysis framework. It natively supports simulations of DNA (oxDNA and oxDNA2) and RNA (oxRNA) on both CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs
LAMMPS is a classical molecular dynamics code with a focus on materials modeling. It’s an acronym for Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator. LAMMPS has potentials for solid-state materials (metals, semiconductors) and soft matter (biomolecules, polymers) and coarse-grained or mesoscopic systems. It can be used to model atoms or, more generically, as a parallel particle simulator at the atomic, meso, or continuum scale. LAMMPS runs on single processors or in parallel using message-passing techniques and a spatial-decomposition of the simulation domain. Many of its models have versions that provide accelerated performance on CPUs, GPUs, and Intel Xeon Phis. The code is designed to be easy to modify or extend with new functionality.
Following recent significant software developments due to machine learning, it became possible to write more concise molecular dynamics simulations offering a range of benefits. JAX allows one to write python code that gets compiled to XLA and allows one to run on CPU, GPU, or TPU. Moreover, JAX allows one to take derivatives of python code. Thus, not only is this molecular dynamics simulation automatically hardware accelerated, it is also end-to-end differentiable. JAX, MD is a research project that is currently under development.
GROMACS is a versatile package to perform molecular dynamics, i.e. simulate the Newtonian equations of motion for systems with hundreds to millions of particles and is a community-driven project. Contributions are welcome in many forms, including improvements to documentation, patches to fix bugs, advice on the forums, bug reports that let us reproduce the issue, and new functionality. It is primarily designed for biochemical molecules like proteins, lipids and nucleic acids that have a lot of complicated bonded interactions, but since GROMACS is extremely fast at calculating the nonbonded interactions (that usually dominate simulations) many groups are also using it for research on non-biological systems, e.g. polymers and fluid dynamics.
OVITO is a scientific data visualization and analysis software for molecular and other particle-based simulation models, which are commonly used in various disciplines including computational soft matter.
FreeFEM is a 2D and 3D partial differential equations (PDE) solver. It offers a large list of finite element methods, like the Lagrange, Taylor-Hood; it is usable in the continuous and discontinuous Galerkin method framework. Pre-built physics: incompressible Navier-Stokes, Lamé equations (for linear elasticity), neo-Hookean, Mooney-Rivlin (nonlinear elasticity), thermal diffusion, thermal convection, termal radiation, magnetostatics, electrostatics, fluid-structure interaction (FSI).
This is a non-exhaustive list of groups and labs working in the fields of Soft and Bio matter, that we started by referencing researchers and labs that contributed to the book by sharing images, videos and data. The list is also intended to help prospective students and postdocs to explore groups that they might like to join, so we are eager to add any resaercher with a soft matter group and a website in English to the list — please use the Write us a comment/Ask a question section of the website to bring your website to our attention.
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