Soft Matter:
Every morning, as you use either your toothpaste or shampoo, you engage with soft matter, materials that flow like liquids under force but hold their shape at rest.
- Soft matter, or soft materials, is a sub-field of “condensed matter”, referring to a variety of materials that can be easily deformed or structurally altered by thermal fluctuations or nominal external stress.
- Soft materials include colloids, polymers, foams, gels, liquid crystals, and many biomaterials.
- They exhibit many useful and appealing properties, which account for their ubiquity in everyday life, finding use in a diverse range of applications in industry including, food, medical, automotive, construction, transportation, electronics, and manufacturing.
- Everyday examples include curd, toothpaste, shampoo, soap bubbles, and living cells.
- One of the important characteristics of soft matter is their physical structures in the mesoscopic scale.
- It is the properties and interactions of these structures that determine the overall behavior of the material.
- Unlike “hard materials” such as metals, ceramics, or glass, the building blocks of soft matter are held together by weak forces.
- As a result, soft material properties can be markedly affected as a result of small changes in temperature, applied force, time, and environment.
