Hydrocolloids between soft matter and taste: Culinary polymer physics

Critical Soft Matter Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics: Soft Matter In and Out of Equilibrium 2015

Brownian motion: a paradigm of soft matter and biological physics

This is a pedagogical introduction to Brownian motion on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s 1905 paper on the subject. After briefly reviewing Einstein’s work in its contemporary context, we pursue some lines of further developments and applications in soft condensed matter and biology. Over the last century Brownian motion became promoted from an odd curiosity of marginal scie...

72. Annual Meeting of the German Physical Society (solid State Physics) Section: Chemical Physics and Polymer Physics (cpp) "driven Soft Matter: Non-equilibrium Phenomena in External Fields"

I will describe the application of the recently developed Forward Flux Sampling method [1-4] for simulating rare events to a nonequilibrium transition nucleation in a sheared two dimensional Ising system. I will describe an analysis of the transition state ensemble to understand the reaction mechanism and rationalise the observed nonmonotonic dependence of the nucleation rate on the shear rate....

Joint Condensed Matter and Center for Soft Matter and Biological Physics Seminar

Filamentous Phages As a Model System in Soft Matter Physics

Filamentous phages have unique physical properties, such as uniform particle lengths, that are not found in other model systems of rod-like colloidal particles. Consequently, suspensions of such phages provided powerful model systems that have advanced our understanding of soft matter physics in general and liquid crystals in particular. We described some of these advances. In particular we bri...