Soft matter roadmap*
Abstract
Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications, is enormous, and controlling or improving their properties is the focus of many efforts. From a fundamental perspective, the possibility of manipulating soft material properties, by tuning interactions between constituents and by applying external perturbations, gives rise to an almost unlimited variety in physical properties. Together with the relative ease to observe and characterise them, this renders soft matter systems powerful model systems to investigate statistical physics phenomena, many of them relevant as well to hard condensed matter systems. Understanding the emerging properties from mesoscale constituents still poses enormous challenges, which have stimulated a wealth of new experimental approaches, including the synthesis of new systems with, e.g. tailored self-assembling properties, or novel experimental techniques in imaging, scattering or rheology. Theoretical and numerical methods, and coarse-grained models, have become central to predict physical properties of soft materials, while computational approaches that also use machine learning tools are playing a progressively major role in many investigations. This Roadmap intends to give a broad overview of recent and possible future activities in the field of soft materials, with experts covering various developments and challenges in material synthesis and characterisation, instrumental, simulation and theoretical methods as well as general concepts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Dec 12, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1088/2515-7639/ad06cc
Entities
People
- Ajay Sood
- Allie C. Obermeyer
- Alshakim Nelson
- Andrea Liu
- Aurelie Hourlier-fargette
- Chinedum Osuji
- Christine M Papadakis
- Colin Scheibner
- Constantinos Tsitsilianis
- David J. Pine
- Emanuela Del Gado
- Eric M. Furst
- Eric Weeks
- Felix Roosen-Runge
- Francesco Sciortino
- Frank Schreiber
- Gijsje H. Koenderink
- Guang J. Zhang
- Heather M Shewan
- I Tah
- Itai Cohen
- Ivan I. Smalyukh
- J. C.
- James A Richards
- Jason R Stokes
- Jean-françois Rupprecht
- Jean-louis Barrat
- Jiheon Kwon
- Joaquin Yus
- Kyle Bishop
- Laurence Ramos
- Luca Cipelletti
- M. Stern
- Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam
- Marjolein Dijkstra
- Matthias Merkel
- Michel Fruchart
- Muhittin Mungan
- Norman Wagner
- Oleg Gang
- Olga Matsarskaia
- Pierre Ronceray
- Rajesh Ganapathy
- Roberto Cerbino
- Rosa M Espinosa-marzal
- Ryan P. Murphy
- S A Ridout
- Sanat K. Kumar
- Sebastien Andrieux
- Shuo Wang
- Srikanth Sastry
- Stefan U Egelhaaf
- Stephen L Craig
- Vincenzo Vitelli
- Wiebke Drenckhan
- Wilson C K Poon
- Xiaoming Mao
- Yilong Han
- Yuan Xu
Organizations
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche
- Aix-Marseille University
- Australian Government
- Australian Research Council
- CNES
- Cardiovascular Research Foundation
- Department of Science and Technology
- Diamond Light Source
- Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems
- Dutch Research Council
- European Research Council
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
- German Research Foundation
- Government of India
- Institut Universitaire de France
- Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
- Ministry of Education, Universities and Research
- National Centre for Nuclear Research
- National Institute of Standards and Technology
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs
- Simons Foundation
- United States Army
- United States Department of Energy
- University of Jamestown