Soft matter roadmap
Date
2023-12-12
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Physics: Materials
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.
Description
This article was originally published in Journal of Physics: Materials. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7639/ad06cc. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
* We would like to dedicate this work to the memory or our colleague and co-author, Stefan Egelhaaf. As this Soft Matter Roadmap was completed and just published online, we received the sad news that Stefan passed away. We mourn the loss of an incredible scientist and a wonderful colleague, a loss for the whole soft matter community. Many of the achievements and new ideas described in this Roadmap build on Stefan's work on imaging, measuring, and understanding soft matter. We feel extremely lucky and privileged to have collaborated with him in designing this Roadmap and grateful for all his help, guidance, and insight into soft matter's future.
Keywords
soft, materials, matter, complex, polymer, colloid
Citation
Barrat, Jean-Louis, Emanuela Del Gado, Stefan U Egelhaaf, Xiaoming Mao, Marjolein Dijkstra, David J Pine, Sanat K Kumar, et al. “Soft Matter Roadmap.” Journal of Physics: Materials 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 012501. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7639/ad06cc.