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Soft Matter and Interfaces
In this course, we introduce the major concepts of soft condensed matter, with a focus on fluid interfaces. Soft condensed matter can be defined as the wide class of complex fluids that exhibit multi-hierarchical structural organization spanning the molecular scale up to the macroscopic scale. These complex fluids present unconventional (even paradoxical) physical properties that emerges due to coupling processes between these different length scales. For instance, mixing air and water (with surfactants) produces an aqueous foams which, although it is solely constituted of fluid phases, behaves as a solid phase that can “melt” under a small mechanical load.
Soft condensed matter physics deals with the properties of a great variety of materials: From the “historical” systems – colloids, polymers, granular materials, foams, emulsions,…-, more recent biological materials and living systems - vegetal, animal -, up to the most advanced development in active matter, self-assembly or supramolecular origamis... Therefore, soft matter is at the cross-over between several fields such as physics, chemistry, material science… which confers to it an essential role in the development of interdisciplinary fundamental physics.
Along the course, we focus on the role of the interfaces encountered in soft matter (for instance, they are at the origin of the solid behavior of a foam), starting from the definition of surface free energy and exploring a few of them among its countless consequences.
Syllabus
Fundamental concepts of interfaces and soft matter are introduced – adsorption, wetting, entropic forces, osmosis, …. - as well as the tool box required to describe soft matter properties. The tools combine thermodynamics, mechanics of continuum media (capillarity, wetting, hydrodynamics, elasticity, …) and statistical physics (phase transitions, fluctuations, Langevin equation, …). A theoretical approach based on scaling laws will be developed in some examples. The ensemble draws a panorama of soft condensed matter linking its macroscopic properties to its microscopic founding principles.
Evaluation
Written exam
Prerequisites