The Oxford Handbook Of Soft Condensed Matter

This Handbook serves both as an introduction and an overview of the field of soft condensed matter. The discussion covers topics ranging from the fundamentals of colloid science to the principles and action of surfactants, modern directions of research in liquid crystals, and the key properties of foams. The book also explores the fundamental physics that controls the structure and mechanics of granular matter; how the unusual and often dramatic mechanical properties of concentrated polymer systems are determined by the physics of entanglements; the complex structures formed by block copolymers and the methods of structure analysis; rubber elasticity and new emerging classes of rubber-elastic materials; the physics of polyelectrolytes; the solvent dynamics in polymer gels, in equilibrium and under mechanical stress; and the hierarchical structure and characteristics of an extracellular matrix.

This text offers an introduction to the properties and behaviour of soft matter. It begins with a treatment of the underlying principles, then discusses how the properties of certain substances and systems are treated within this framework.

Soft condensed matter is a relatively new topic. Condensed matter has typically referred to more traditional liquids, which have a long history of study, or to solids, which have focused more commonly on hard materials, driven in large measure by the importance of structural materials or the metals and semiconductors which drove the rapid evolution of microelectronics. It is only relatively recently, over the past 20 to 30 years, that soft condensed matter has matured into its own identifiable field. However, the field is an amalgam of many subfields, and many of these have themselves much longer histories. This handbook serves as an overview of many of these topics. Because of the great breadth, it is impossible to include them all; nevertheless, the key subjects of soft condensed matter are represented here. Together, they form both an introduction and an overview of the field. Each topic, and its representing Chapter, could have been a full size book - in fact, there are a number of such books on many of the topics covered in the handbook. Our aim here was to give a current snapshot of the field, identify the key principles at play and the most prominent (and promising) ways of its further development, provide essential references for anyone to follow the subject, but not necessarily go into a lot of detail on each topic.

This text offers an introduction to the properties and behaviour of soft matter. It begins with a treatment of the underlying principles, then discusses how the properties of certain substances and systems are treated within this framework.

Soft matter (polymers, colloids, surfactants and liquid crystals) are an important class of materials in modern technology. They also form the basis of many future technologies, for example in medical and environmental applications. Soft matter shows complex behaviour between fluids and solids, and used to be a synonym of complex materials. Due to the developments of the past two decades, soft condensed matter can now be discussed on the same sound physical basis as solid condensed matter. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of soft matter for undergraduate and graduate students in physics and materials science. The book provides an introduction to soft matter (what it is, and what are the characteristics of such materials), and also provides the reader with the physical basis for understanding and discussing such characteristics in more detail. Many basic concepts, which are required in advanced courses of condensed matter physics, such as coarse graining, scaling, phase separation, order-disorder transition, Brownian motion, and fluctuation-dissipation theorem, are explained in detail with various forms of soft matter used as examples.

This book presents a compilation of self-contained chapters covering a wide range of topics within the broad field of soft condensed matter. Each chapter starts with basic definitions to bring the reader up-to-date on the topic at hand, describing how to use fluid flows to generate soft materials of high value either for applications or for basic research. Coverage includes topics related to colloidal suspensions and soft materials and how they differ in behavior, along with a roadmap for researchers on how to use soft materials to study relevant physics questions related to geometrical frustration.

This is a first undergraduate textbook in Solid State Physics or Condensed Matter Physics. While most textbooks on the subject are extremely dry, this book is written to be much more exciting, inspiring, and entertaining.