SERIES IN SOFT CONDENSED MATTER – serie

This is a monograph written for the young and advanced researcher who is entering the field of wet granular matter, keen to understand the basic physical principles governing this state of soft matter. It treats wet granulates as a ternary system consisting of the grains, a primary, and a secondary fluid. After generally addressing wetting phenomena and outlining the basic facts on dry granular systems, a chapter on basic mechanisms and their effects is dedicated to every region of the ternary phase diagram. Effects of grain shape and roughness are considered as well. Rather than addressing engineering aspects like existing books on this topic do, this book aims to provide a generalized framework suitable for those who want to understand these systems on a more fundamental basis. It spans a wide scope of questions, ranging from possible general principles behind the emergence of structure and pattern, to the interpretation of geological outcrop features we encounter in nature.

Polymer thin films is an emerging area driven by their enormous technological potential and the intellectually challenging academic problems associated with them. This book contains a collection of review articles on the current topics of polymer films written by leading experts in the field. To reflect the interdisciplinary nature of this field, the contributors hail from a wide range of disciplines, including chemists, chemical engineers, materials scientists, engineers, and physicists. The goal of this book is to provide readers, whether involved in or outside of the field of polymer films, with an encompassing and informative reference.

This unique book aims to expose the reader to a wide range of phenomena occurring when soft matter systems are put under the influence of an external electric field. The book shows how an electric field can be used to affect objects at the submicron scale, and how it controls the phase behavior of liquids and polymers. The main focus is on the basic underlying mechanisms. Some technological applications are dealt with as well.Book chapters are arranged in a logical order, from “simple” systems to more complicated ones. In addition, each topic is covered by the mixed bag of theory, experiment and simulation; and this will give the reader a broad perspective of the underlying physical phenomena.

All living organisms consist of soft matter. For this reason alone, it is important to be able to understand and predict the structural and dynamical properties of soft materials such as polymers, surfactants, colloids, granular matter and liquids crystals. To achieve a better understanding of soft matter, three different approaches have to be integrated: experiment, theory and simulation. This book focuses on the third approach — but always in the context of the other two.

Many fundamental issues in classical condensed matter physics can be addressed experimentally using systems of individually visible mesoscopic particles playing the role of “proxy atoms”. The interaction between such “atoms” is determined by the properties of the surrounding medium and/or by external tuning. The best-known examples of such experimental model systems are two different domains of soft matter — complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions.The major goal of this book — written by scientists representing both complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions — is to bring the two fields together. In the first part of the book the basic properties of the two systems are summarized, demonstrating huge conceptual and methodological overlap of the fields and emphasizing numerous cross-connections between them and their essential complementarity. This “introductory part” should serve to help each community in understanding the other field better. Simultaneously, this provides the necessary basis for the second part focused on particle-resolved studies of diverse generic phenomena in liquids and solids — all performed with complex plasmas and/or colloidal dispersions. The book is concluded with the discussion of critical open issues and fascinating perspectives of such interdisciplinary research.

Soft matter is a concept which covers polymers, liquid crystals, colloids, amphiphilic molecules, glasses, granular and biological materials. One of the fundamental characteristic features of soft matter is that it exhibits various mesoscopic structures originating from a large number of internal degrees of freedom of each molecule. Due to such intermediate structures, soft matter can easily be brought into non-equilibrium states and cause non-linear responses by imposing external fields such as an electric field, a mechanical stress or a shear flow. Volume 4 of the series in Soft Condensed Matter focuses on the non-linear and non-equilibrium properties of soft matter. It contains a collection of review articles on the current topics of non-equilibrium soft matter physics written by leading experts in the field. The topics dealt with in this volume includes rheology of polymers and liquid crystals, dynamical properties of Langmuir monolayers at the air/water interface, hydrodynamics of membranes and twisted filaments as well as dynamics of deformable self-propelled particles and migration of biological cells. This book serves both as an introduction to students as well as a useful reference to researchers.

"The overall book content is excellently coordinated to form a synchronised story, interesting to a broad scientific audience … The book summarises the present knowledge in the field, introduces fundamental concepts to the beginners, describes key measuring methods and presents several different typical demonstrative systems, some of them exhibiting an extraordinary rich spectrum of structures and superstructures. I am sure that with time the book will become an attractor to a broad audience (physicists, chemists, material scientists, engineers, etc.), ranging from students, beginners in the field to experienced researchers. To summarise, this is the book that I have been missing on my bookshelf."Liquid Crystals TodayWhile liquid crystals are today widely known for their successful application in flat panel displays (LCDs), academic liquid crystal research is more and more targeting situations where these anisotropic fluids are put to completely different use, in varying contexts. A particularly strong focus is on colloidal liquid crystals, where particles, bubbles or drops are dispersed in a liquid crystal phase. The liquid crystal can act as a host phase, with the inclusions constituting foreign guests that disturb the local order in interesting ways, often resulting in large-scale positional arrangement and/or uniform alignment of the guests. But it may also be formed by solid particles themselves, if these are of nanoscale dimensions and of disc- or rod-shape, and if they are suspended in an isotropic liquid host at sufficient concentration.This book aims to cover both the modern research tracks, gathering pioneering researchers of the different subfields to give a concise overview of the basis as well as the prospects of their respective specialties. The scope spans from curiosity-driven fundamental scientific research to applied sciences. Over the course of the next decade, the former is likely to generate new tracks of the latter type, considering the exploratory and productive phase of this young research field.