Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications
Wim van Saarloos, Vincenzo Vitelli, Zorana Zeravcic
This website accompanies the textbook Soft Matter, Concepts, Phenomena and Applications which is published by Princeton University Press in 2024. Soft matter science is an interdisciplinary field at the interface of physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, and materials science. It encompasses colloids, polymers, and liquid crystals as well as rapidly emerging topics such as metamaterials, memory formation and learning in matter, bioactive systems, and artificial life.
Because of the nature of the field, and the fact that we encounter soft matter almost everywhere around us, there are many interesting demonstrations that illustrate the material we cover in the book. This website collects many illustrative examples, as well as a number of recorded lectures that are publicly available on internet and which expand on topics we cover only briefly. The linked resources are organized in the same way as the book (see our Table of Content).
Note that this current website is still under development and will continue to be so during 2024. You are invited to share feedback or interesting material with us in the comments section of the website.
Our textbook introduces key phenomena and concepts in soft matter from a modern perspective, marrying established knowledge with the latest developments and applications. The presentation integrates statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, and hydrodynamic approaches, emphasizing conservation laws and broken symmetries as guiding principles while paying attention to computational and machine learning advances.