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Soft matter interfaces
Soft matter encompasses a wide ensemble of physical systems - fluids, foams, sand, polymers, fabric, cells, biological tissues… - with very diverse properties and phenomenologies. Yet, they share a few key aspects that make them approachable by similar physical strategies: they often have a complex microscopic structure, dominated by entropic and electrostatic forces, resulting in deformability or solidity depending on context, and more generally they display emergent and universal behavior distinct from that of ‘hard’ condensed matter like crystals. In addition, many soft systems, like foams, emulsions or sand, are actually “mostly made of surfaces”; their macroscopic properties then derive from particular physical interactions at the interface between fluids, colloidal particles, macromolecules, membranes, etc.
The goal of this course is to introduce fundamental concepts of soft matter through concrete examples and important theoretical frameworks.
Syllabus
Starting from concrete example from experimental physics and everyday life, the course will introduce the basic theoretical tools to describe soft matter systems. At the macroscopic scale, we will study how wetting, interfacial hydrodynamics and membrane mechanics can give definite shape to soft and deformable systems like liquid surfaces, soap films, foams and cells. This approach will be complemented by an introduction to various frameworks borrowed from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics describing the underlying microscopic and molecular processes: electrostatics in liquids, osmosis, density functional theory, Brownian motion, etc. In each case, we will show how these approaches naturally emerge when one tries to understand concrete physical phenomena (how do insects walk on water? how do sand castle hold? why do
certain emulsions eventually aggregate and not others?…).
Evaluation
Written exam
Prerequisites
Basic knowledge in statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics.
