Soft matter

Soft matter is ubiquitous in a vast range of technological applications and is of fundamental relevance in such diverse fields as chemical, environmental, and food industry as weIl as life sciences. Over the past years, soft matter science has been largely extended in its scope from more traditional areas such as colloids and polymers to the study of biological systems, soft nanoscale materials, and the development of novel composites and microfluidic devices. Soft and biological materials share fundamental structural and dynamical features including a rich variety of morphologies and non-equilibrium phenomena, self-Ol'ganisation, an unusual friction-dominated flow dynamics, and a high sensitivity to external fields. These properties emerge from the co operative interplay of many degrees of freedom, with spatio-tempOl'al COl'relations that can span a huge range from nano- to millimetres and nanoseconds to days. The key requirements for the advancement in the field of these highly complex soft materials are: 111 The development of novel experimental techniques to study properties of individual components in processes and the co operative behaviOl' of many interacting constituents. The synthesis of complex materials, self-organized and biomimetic systems with novel or unusual properties will broaden the spectrum of applications. CI The exploration of advanced theOl'etical and computer simulation methods that span the large range of time and length scales and allow to cope with an increasing complexity of moleculaI' constituents. Existing methods need to be extended and new approaches are required to describe systems far from equilibrium, e. g., in life sciences and material processing. <! l Structural and novel functional properties of soft and biological materials need to be studied invoking self-organization and hierarchical structure formation, entropic particle interactions and fluid-Iike aspects of biological materials such as vesicles and cells. CI The unusual dynamics of complex fluids requires special approaches to gain insight into diffusion transport properties, rheology and mesoscopic flow behavior, which are influenced by a delicate interplay of hydrodynamic interactions, thermal flllctliations, and external fields.