Soft Matter In Plants

Plants offer some of the most elegant applications of soft matter principles in Nature. Understanding the interplay between chemistry, physics, biology, and fluid mechanics is critical to forecast plant behaviour, which is necessary for agriculture and disease management. It also provides inspiration for novel engineering applications. Starting with fundamental concepts around plant biology, physics of soft matter and viscous fluids, readers of this book will be given a cross-disciplinary and expert grounding to the field. The book covers local scale aspects, such as cell and tissue mechanics, to regional scale matters covering movement, tropism, roots, through to global scale topics around fluid transport. Focussed chapters on water stress, networks, and biomimetics provide the user with a concise and complete introduction. Edited by internationally recognised leading experts in this field with contributions from key investigators worldwide, this book is the first introduction to the subject matter and will be suitable for both physical and life science readers.

Plants offer some of the most elegant applications of soft matter principles in Nature. Understanding the interplay between chemistry, physics, biology, and fluid mechanics is critical to forecast plant behaviour, which is necessary for agriculture and disease management. It also provides inspiration for novel engineering applications. Starting with fundamental concepts around plant biology, physics of soft matter and viscous fluids, readers of this book will be given a cross-disciplinary and expert grounding to the field. The book covers local scale aspects, such as cell and tissue mechanics, to regional scale matters covering movement, tropism, roots, through to global scale topics around fluid transport. Focussed chapters on water stress, networks, and biomimetics provide the user with a concise and complete introduction. Edited by internationally recognised leading experts in this field with contributions from key investigators worldwide, this book is the first introduction to the subject matter and will be suitable for both physical and life science readers.

Authored by world-leading physicists, this introductory textbook explores the basic principles of polymers, colloids, liquid crystals, wetting, and foams. It is a practical ‘toolbox’ for readers to acquire basic knowledge in the field and facilitate further reading and advanced courses. Undergraduate students in physics, biology, and the medical sciences will learn the basics of soft matter physics, in addition to scaling approaches in the spirit of the Nobel prize laureate in physics in 1991, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, the inventor of soft matter physics and close collaborator to author Françoise Brochard-Wyart. Features: Accessible and compact approach Contains exercises to enhance understanding All chapters are followed by a short 1-2 page "insert chapter" which serve as illustrations with concrete examples from everyday life (e.g. the Paris Metro, a zebrafish, a gecko, duck feathers etc.)

The physics of soft condensed matter is probably one of the most 'fashionable' areas in the physical sciences today. This book offers a coherent and clear introduction to the properties and behaviour of soft matter. It begins with a treatment of the general underlying principles: the relation of the structure and dynamics of solids and liquids to intermolecular forces, the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transitions, and the principles of self-assembly. Then the specific properties of colloids, polymers, liquid crystals and self-assembling amphiphilic systems are treated within this framework. A concluding chapter illustrates how principles of soft matter physics can be used to understand properties of biological systems. The focus on the essentials and the straightforward approach make the book suitable for students with either a theoretical or an experimental bias. The level is appropriate for final year undergraduates and beginning graduate students in physics, chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering.

This 2-volume set includes extensive discussions of scattering techniques (light, neutron and X-ray) and related fluctuation and grating techniques that are at the forefront of this field. Most of the scattering techniques are Fourier space techniques. Recent advances have seen the development of powerful direct imaging methods such as atomic force microscopy and scanning probe microscopy. In addition, techniques that can be used to manipulate soft matter on the nanometer scale are also in rapid development. These include the scanning probe microscopy technique mentioned above as well as optical and magnetic tweezers.

Neutron and synchrotron facilities, which are beyond the scale of the laboratory, and supported on a national level in countries throughout the world. These tools for probing micro- and nano-structure research and on fast dynamics research of atomic location in materials have been key in the development of new polymer-based materials. Different from several existing professional books on neutron science, this book focuses on theory, instrumentation, an applications. The book is divided into five parts: Part 1 describes the underlying theory of neutron scattering. Part 2 describes the various instruments that exist and the various techniques used to achieve neutron scattering or bombardment. Part 3 discusses data treatment and simulation methods as well as how to assess the environment of the sample (temperature, pressure, shear, and external fields). Part 4 addresses the myriad applications of small and large molecules, biomolecules, and gels. Part 5 describes the various global neutron sources that exist and provides an overview of the different reactors.

Roberto Piazza says: “Physics should be made simple enough to be amusing, but not so trivial as to spoil the fun.” This is exactly the approach of this book in making the science of ‘soft matter’ relevant to everyday life things such as the food we eat, the plastic we use, the concrete we build with, the cells we are made of.

This book explores the structure-property-process relationship of biomaterials from engineering and biomedical perspectives, and the potential of bio-inspired materials and their applications. A large variety of natural materials with outstanding physical and mechanical properties have appeared in the course of evolution. From a bio-inspired viewpoint, materials design requires a novel and highly cross disciplinary approach. Considerable benefits can be gained by providing an integrated approach using bio-inspiration with materials science and engineering. The book is divided into three parts; Part One focuses on mechanical aspects, dealing with conventional material properties: strength, toughness, hardness, wear resistance, impact resistance, self-healing, adhesion, and adaptation and morphing. Part Two focuses on functional materials with unique capabilities, such as self-cleaning, stimuli-response, structural color, anti-reflective materials, catalytic materials for clean energy conversion and storage, and other related topics. Part Three describes how to mimic natural materials processes to synthesize materials with low cost, efficient and environmentally friendly approaches. For each chapter, the approach is to describe situations in nature first and then biomimetic materials, fulfilling the need for an interdisciplinary approach which overlaps both engineering and materials science.