Soft Matter Physics

 

This graduate course is an overview of the phenomenology and the theoretical concepts in the physics of soft condensed matter. The course covers simple liquids, liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, and membranes but it also extends to foams and granular matter. Based on thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and theory of elasticity, the course emphasizes the common ideas behind the various types of order and dynamics in soft matter, especially the role of entropy. The lectures rely on a selection of illustrative examples from a given branch of soft matter, thereby providing a starting point for an in-depth study of any of the topics covered.

The course consists of lectures (2 hours per week) and tutorials (1 hour per week). The students work out and present 1 homework assignment, typically a technically more involved example. Students may take the exam after they have handed in and presented the term paper.

References: There exist a range of good textbooks on soft matter. A concise introduction is Ref. [1]; Ref. [5] contains a comprehensive theoretical account of many but not all soft-matter concepts in addition to many non-soft-matter topics. Refs. [1-5] are general, Refs. [6-13] are more specialized:

[1] R. A. L. Jones, Soft Condensed Matter (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002).

[2] T. A. Witten, Structured Fluids (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

[3] M. Daoud and C. E. Williams (eds.), Soft Matter Physics (Springer, Berlin, 1999).

[4] I. W. Hamley, Introduction to Soft Matter (Wiley, Chichester, 2000).

[5] P. M. Chaikin and T. C. Lubensky, Principles of Condensed Matter Physics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).

[6] J.-P. Hansen and I. R. McDonald, Theory of Simple Liquids (Academic Press, San Diego, 1986).

[7] G. Strobl, The Physics of Polymers (Springer, Berlin, 1997).

[8] T. Kawakatsu, Statistical Physics of Polymers (Springer, Berlin, 2001).

[9] P. J. Collings and M. Hird, Introduction to Liquid Crystals (Taylor & Francis, London, 1997).

[10] P.-G. de Gennes and J. Prost, The Physics of Liquid Crystals, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).

[11] D. R. Nelson, T. Piran, and S. Weinberg (eds.), Statistical Mechanics of Membranes and Surfaces (World Scientific, Singapore, 2004).

[12] S. Hyde, S. Andersson, K. Larsson, Z. Blum, T. Landh, S. Lidin, and B. W. Ninham, The Language of Shape (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1997).

[13] J. Duran, Sands, Powders, and Grains (Springer, Berlin, 1999).

The 2019/20 course outline is available here. Here is a preliminary version of the lecture notes. Should you find any errors or misprints please do let me know.

Tutorials: The teaching assistant is Matej Kanduc. Here is the link to his webpage with coursework materials.