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== Distinctive physics ==
== Distinctive physics ==
[[File:Phospholipids aqueous solution structures.svg|thumb|The self-assembly of individual phospholipids into colloids (Liposome and Micelle) or a membrane (bilayer sheet).]]
Interesting behaviors arise from soft matter in ways that cannot be predicted, or are difficult to predict, directly from its atomic or molecular constituents. Materials termed soft matter exhibit this property due to a shared propensity of these materials to [[Self-organization|self-organize]] into ''[[Mesoscopic scale|mesoscopic]]'' physical structures. By way of contrast, in hard [[condensed matter physics]] it is often possible to predict the overall behavior of a material because the molecules are organized into a [[Crystal structure|crystalline lattice]] with no changes in the pattern at any mesoscopic scale.
Interesting behaviors arise from soft matter in ways that cannot be predicted, or are difficult to predict, directly from its [[Atom|atomic]] or [[Molecule|molecular]] constituents. Materials termed soft matter exhibit this property due to a shared propensity of these materials to [[Self-organization|self-organize]] into mesoscopic physical structures. The assembly of the mesoscale structures that form the macroscale material is governed by low energies, and these low energy associations allow for the thermal and mechanical deformation of the material.<ref name=":7">{{Cite journal |last=van der Gucht |first=Jasper |date=2018-08-22 |title=Grand Challenges in Soft Matter Physics |url=https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fphy.2018.00087/full |journal=Frontiers in Physics |volume=6 |pages=87 |doi=10.3389/fphy.2018.00087 |issn=2296-424X}}</ref> By way of contrast, in hard [[condensed matter physics]] it is often possible to predict the overall behavior of a material because the molecules are organized into a [[Crystal|crystalline lattice]] with no changes in the pattern at any mesoscopic scale. Unlike hard materials, where only small distortions occur from thermal or mechanical agitation, soft matter can undergo local rearrangements of the microscopic building blocks.<ref name=":8">{{Citation |last=Spagnoli |first=A. |title=Fracture in soft elastic materials: Continuum description, molecular aspects and applications |date=2022 |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0065215621000028 |work=Advances in Applied Mechanics |volume=55 |pages=255–307 |publisher=Elsevier |language=en |doi=10.1016/bs.aams.2021.07.001 |isbn=978-0-12-824617-7 |access-date=2023-02-13 |last2=Brighenti |first2=R. |last3=Cosma |first3=M.P. |last4=Terzano |first4=M.}}</ref>


One defining characteristic of soft matter is the [[mesoscopic scale]]
A defining characteristic of soft matter is the [[mesoscopic scale]]
of physical structures. The structures are much larger than the microscopic scale (the arrangement of [[atom]]s and [[molecule]]s), and yet are much smaller than the macroscopic (overall) scale of the material. The properties and interactions of these mesoscopic structures may determine the macroscopic behavior of the material.<ref name="jones">{{cite book|last1=Jones|first1=R.A.L.|title=Soft condensed matter|date=2004|publisher=Oxford Univ. Pr.|location=Oxford [u.a.]|isbn=978-0-19-850589-1|pages=1–2|edition=Reprint.}}</ref> For example, the [[Turbulence|turbulent]] [[vortex|vortices]] that naturally occur within a flowing [[liquid]] are much smaller than the overall quantity of liquid and yet much larger than its individual molecules, and the emergence of these vortices control the overall flowing behavior of the material. Also, the bubbles that comprise a [[foam]] are mesoscopic because they individually consist of a vast number of molecules, and yet the foam itself consists of a great number of these bubbles, and the overall mechanical stiffness of the foam emerges from the combined interactions of the bubbles.
of physical structures. The structures are much larger than the microscopic scale (the arrangement of [[atom]]s and [[molecule]]s), and yet are much smaller than the macroscopic (overall) scale of the material. The properties and interactions of these mesoscopic structures may determine the macroscopic behavior of the material.<ref name="jones">{{cite book|last1=Jones|first1=R.A.L.|title=Soft condensed matter|date=2004|publisher=Oxford Univ. Pr.|location=Oxford [u.a.]|isbn=978-0-19-850589-1|pages=1–2|edition=Reprint.}}</ref> The large number of constituents forming these mesoscopic structures, and the large [[Degrees of freedom (statistics)|degrees of freedom]] this causes, results in a general disorder between the large-scale structures. This disorder leads to the loss of long-range order that is characteristic of hard matter.<ref name=":5">{{Cite journal |last=Nagel |first=Sidney R. |date=2017-04-12 |title=Experimental soft-matter science |url=http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.89.025002 |journal=Reviews of Modern Physics |language=en |volume=89 |issue=2 |pages=025002 |doi=10.1103/RevModPhys.89.025002 |issn=0034-6861}}</ref> For example, the [[Turbulence|turbulent]] [[vortex|vortices]] that naturally occur within a flowing [[liquid]] are much smaller than the overall quantity of liquid and yet much larger than its individual molecules, and the emergence of these vortices control the overall flowing behavior of the material. Also, the bubbles that comprise a [[foam]] are mesoscopic because they individually consist of a vast number of molecules, and yet the foam itself consists of a great number of these bubbles, and the overall mechanical stiffness of the foam emerges from the combined interactions of the bubbles.


A second common feature of soft matter is the importance of thermal fluctuations. Typical bond energies in soft matter structures are of similar scale as thermal energies. Therefore, the structures are constantly affected by thermal fluctuations, undergoing [[Brownian motion]].<ref name="jones" />
A second common feature of soft matter is the importance of thermal fluctuations. Typical bond energies in soft matter structures are of similar scale as thermal energies. Therefore, the structures are constantly affected by thermal fluctuations, undergoing [[Brownian motion]].<ref name="jones" />

Revision as of 17:33, 21 February 2023

For the journal, see Soft Matter (journal).
Condensed matter physics
States of matter
Phase phenomena
Electronic phases
Electronic phenomena
Magnetic phases
Quasiparticles
Soft matter
Scientists

Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy (of order of kT), and that entropy is considered the dominant factor.[1] At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter,"[2] received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to the more complex cases found in soft matter, in particular, to the behaviors of liquid crystals and polymers.[3]

History

The current understanding of soft matter grew from the Albert Einstein's work on Brownian motion,[4][5] understanding that a particle suspended in a fluid must have a similar thermal energy to the fluid itself (of order of kT). This work built on established research into systems that would now be considered colloids.[6]

The crystalline optical properties of liquid crystals and their ability to flow were first described by Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888,[7] and further characterized by Otto Lehmann in 1889.[8] The experimental setup that Lehmann used to investigate the two melting points of cholesteryl benzoate are still used in the research of liquid crystals today.[9]

In 1920, Hermann Staudinger, recipient of the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,[10] was the first person to suggest that polymers are formed through covalent bonds that link smaller molecules together.[11] The idea of a macromolecule was unheard of at the time, with the scientific consensus that the recorded high molecular weights of compounds like natural rubber were instead due to aggregation.[12]

The use of hydrogels in the biomedical field was pioneered in the 1960 by Drahoslav Lím and Otto Wichterle.[13] Together they postulated that the chemical stability, ease of deformation, and permeability of certain polymer networks in aqueous environments would have a significant impact on medicine, and were the inventors of the soft contact lens.[14]

These seemingly separate fields were dramatically influenced and brought together by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. de Gennes' work across different forms of soft matter were key in understanding its universality, where material properties are not based on the chemistry of the underlying structure, more so on the mesoscopic structures the underlying chemistry creates.[15] de Gennes extended the understanding of phase changes in liquid crystals, introduced the idea of reptation regarding the relaxation of polymer systems, and successfully mapped polymer behavior to that of the Ising model.[15][16]

Distinctive physics

The self-assembly of individual phospholipids into colloids (Liposome and Micelle) or a membrane (bilayer sheet).

Interesting behaviors arise from soft matter in ways that cannot be predicted, or are difficult to predict, directly from its atomic or molecular constituents. Materials termed soft matter exhibit this property due to a shared propensity of these materials to self-organize into mesoscopic physical structures. The assembly of the mesoscale structures that form the macroscale material is governed by low energies, and these low energy associations allow for the thermal and mechanical deformation of the material.[17] By way of contrast, in hard condensed matter physics it is often possible to predict the overall behavior of a material because the molecules are organized into a crystalline lattice with no changes in the pattern at any mesoscopic scale. Unlike hard materials, where only small distortions occur from thermal or mechanical agitation, soft matter can undergo local rearrangements of the microscopic building blocks.[18]

A defining characteristic of soft matter is the mesoscopic scale of physical structures. The structures are much larger than the microscopic scale (the arrangement of atoms and molecules), and yet are much smaller than the macroscopic (overall) scale of the material. The properties and interactions of these mesoscopic structures may determine the macroscopic behavior of the material.[19] The large number of constituents forming these mesoscopic structures, and the large degrees of freedom this causes, results in a general disorder between the large-scale structures. This disorder leads to the loss of long-range order that is characteristic of hard matter.[20] For example, the turbulent vortices that naturally occur within a flowing liquid are much smaller than the overall quantity of liquid and yet much larger than its individual molecules, and the emergence of these vortices control the overall flowing behavior of the material. Also, the bubbles that comprise a foam are mesoscopic because they individually consist of a vast number of molecules, and yet the foam itself consists of a great number of these bubbles, and the overall mechanical stiffness of the foam emerges from the combined interactions of the bubbles.

A second common feature of soft matter is the importance of thermal fluctuations. Typical bond energies in soft matter structures are of similar scale as thermal energies. Therefore, the structures are constantly affected by thermal fluctuations, undergoing Brownian motion.[19]

Finally, a third distinctive feature of soft matter system is self-assembly. The characteristic complex behavior and hierarchical structures arise spontaneously as the system evolves towards equilibrium.[19]

Soft materials also present an interesting behavior during fracture because they become highly deformed before crack propagation. Therefore, the fracture of soft material differs significantly from the general fracture mechanics formulation.

Applications

Soft materials are important in a wide range of technological applications. They may appear as structural and packaging materials, foams and adhesives, detergents and cosmetics, paints, food additives, lubricants and fuel additives, rubber in tires, etc. In addition, a number of biological materials (blood, muscle, milk, yogurt, jello) are classifiable as soft matter. Liquid crystals, another category of soft matter, exhibit a responsivity to electric fields that make them very important as materials in display devices (LCDs). In spite of the various forms of these materials, many of their properties have common physicochemical origins, such as a large number of internal degrees of freedom, weak interactions between structural elements, and a delicate balance between entropic and enthalpic contributions to the free energy. These properties lead to large thermal fluctuations, a wide variety of forms, sensitivity of equilibrium structures to external conditions, macroscopic softness, and metastable states. Active liquid crystals are another example of soft materials, where the constituent elements in liquid crystals can self propel. Soft matter, such as polymers and lipids have found applications in nanotechnology as well.[21][22]

Research

The realization that soft matter contains innumerable examples of symmetry breaking, generalized elasticity, and many fluctuating degrees of freedom has re-invigorated classical fields of physics such as fluids (now generalized to non-Newtonian and structured media) and elasticity (membranes, filaments, and anisotropic networks are all important and have common aspects).

Historically the problems considered in the early days of soft matter science were those pertaining to the biological sciences. As such, an important part of soft condensed matter research is biophysics with a major goal of the discipline being the reduction of the field of cell biology to the concepts of soft matter physics.[19]

Related

See also

References

  1. ^ Kleman, Maurice; Lavrentovich, Oleg D., eds. (2003). Soft Matter Physics: An Introduction. New York, NY: Springer New York. doi:10.1007/b97416. ISBN 978-0-387-95267-3.
  2. ^ Rheology Bulletin Volume 74 Number 2 July 2005, p. 17.
  3. ^ The Nobel Prize in Physics 1991. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 13 Feb 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1991/summary/>
  4. ^ Einstein, Albert (1905). "Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" [On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat]. Annalen der Physik (in German). 322 (8): 549–560. doi:10.1002/andp.19053220806.
  5. ^ Mezzenga, Raffaele (2021-12-22). "Grand Challenges in Soft Matter". Frontiers in Soft Matter. 1: 811842. doi:10.3389/frsfm.2021.811842. ISSN 2813-0499.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  6. ^ McLeish, Tom (2020). Soft Matter: a Very Short Introduction (1st ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-880713-1. OCLC 1202271044.
  7. ^ Reinitzer, Friedrich (1888). "Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Cholesterins". Monatshefte für Chemie - Chemical Monthly (in German). 9 (1): 421–441. doi:10.1007/BF01516710. ISSN 0026-9247.
  8. ^ Lehmann, O. (1889-07-01). "Über fliessende Krystalle". Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie. 4U (1): 462–472. doi:10.1515/zpch-1889-0434. ISSN 2196-7156.
  9. ^ DiLisi, Gregory A (2019). An Introduction to Liquid Crystals. IOP Publishing. doi:10.1088/2053-2571/ab2a6fch1. ISBN 978-1-64327-684-7.
  10. ^ Hermann Staudinger – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 13 Feb 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1953/staudinger/biographical/>
  11. ^ Staudinger, H. (1920-06-12). "Über Polymerisation". Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft (A and B Series). 53 (6): 1073–1085. doi:10.1002/cber.19200530627. ISSN 0365-9488.
  12. ^ American Chemical Society International Historic Chemical Landmarks. Foundations of Polymer Science: Hermann Staudinger and Macromolecules. http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/staudingerpolymerscience.html (accessed Feb 13th, 2023).
  13. ^ Hydrogels : recent advances. Vijay Kumar Thakur, Manju Kumari Thakur. Singapore. 2018. ISBN 978-981-10-6077-9. OCLC 1050163199.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  14. ^ Wichterle, O.; Lím, D. (1960). "Hydrophilic Gels for Biological Use". Nature. 185 (4706): 117–118. doi:10.1038/185117a0. ISSN 0028-0836.
  15. ^ a b Joanny, Jean-François; Cates, Michael (2019). "Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. 24 October 1932—18 May 2007". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 66: 143–158. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2018.0033. ISSN 0080-4606.
  16. ^ de Gennes, P.G. (1972). "Exponents for the excluded volume problem as derived by the Wilson method". Physics Letters A. 38 (5): 339–340. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(72)90149-1.
  17. ^ van der Gucht, Jasper (2018-08-22). "Grand Challenges in Soft Matter Physics". Frontiers in Physics. 6: 87. doi:10.3389/fphy.2018.00087. ISSN 2296-424X.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  18. ^ Spagnoli, A.; Brighenti, R.; Cosma, M.P.; Terzano, M. (2022), "Fracture in soft elastic materials: Continuum description, molecular aspects and applications", Advances in Applied Mechanics, vol. 55, Elsevier, pp. 255–307, doi:10.1016/bs.aams.2021.07.001, ISBN 978-0-12-824617-7, retrieved 2023-02-13
  19. ^ a b c d Jones, R.A.L. (2004). Soft condensed matter (Reprint. ed.). Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford Univ. Pr. pp. 1–2. ISBN 978-0-19-850589-1.
  20. ^ Nagel, Sidney R. (2017-04-12). "Experimental soft-matter science". Reviews of Modern Physics. 89 (2): 025002. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.89.025002. ISSN 0034-6861.
  21. ^ Mashaghi S.; Jadidi T.; Koenderink G.; Mashaghi A. (2013). "Lipid Nanotechnology". Int. J. Mol. Sci. 14 (2): 4242–4282. doi:10.3390/ijms14024242. PMC 3588097. PMID 23429269.
  22. ^ Hamley I. W. (2003). "Nanotechnology with Soft Materials". Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 42 (15): 1692–1712. doi:10.1002/anie.200200546.
  • I. Hamley, Introduction to Soft Matter (2nd edition), J. Wiley, Chichester (2000).
  • R. A. L. Jones, Soft Condensed Matter, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002).
  • T. A. Witten (with P. A. Pincus), Structured Fluids: Polymers, Colloids, Surfactants, Oxford (2004).
  • M. Kleman and O. D. Lavrentovich, Soft Matter Physics: An Introduction, Springer (2003).
  • M. Mitov, Sensitive Matter: Foams, Gels, Liquid Crystals and Other Miracles, Harvard University Press (2012).
  • J. N. Israelachvili, Intermolecular and Surface Forces, Academic Press (2010).
  • A. V. Zvelindovsky (editor), Nanostructured Soft Matter - Experiment, Theory, Simulation and Perspectives, Springer/Dordrecht (2007), ISBN 978-1-4020-6329-9.
  • M. Daoud, C.E. Williams (editors), Soft Matter Physics, Springer Verlag, Berlin (1999).
  • Gerald H. Ristow, Pattern Formation in Granular Materials, Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, v. 161. Springer, Berlin (2000). ISBN 3-540-66701-6.
  • de Gennes, Pierre-Gilles, Soft Matter, Nobel Lecture, December 9, 1991
  • S. A. Safran,Statistical thermodynamics of surfaces, interfaces and membranes, Westview Press (2003)
  • R.G. Larson, "The Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids," Oxford University Press (1999)
  • Gang, Oleg, "Soft Matter and Biomaterials on the Nanoscale: The WSPC Reference on Functional Nanomaterials — Part I (In 4 Volumes)", World Scientific Publisher (2020)

External links

Media related to Soft matter at Wikimedia Commons

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