Monday and Friday, 9:00-11:00, Schrödinger lecture hall
starting on October 1, 2007

 
The term "Soft Matter" encompasses an enormous variety of substances and materials of great fundamental and technological relevance. From paints and toothpaste to blood and living matter, we are made of and surrounded by soft matter systems in all aspects of our everyday life. The salient features of soft matter are, on the level of their constituents, the high complexity of the materials involved and their mulitcomponent character, encompassing entities that span the length scales from the atomic to the mesoscopic. On the level of macroscopic properties, soft materials are characterized by their unusual sensitivity of reaction to external stimuli, such as electromagnetic fields, confinement and shear. Traditionally anchored in the academic discipline of materials science and physical chemistry, soft matter has entered in the last twenty years the realm of theoretical physics, due to advances that have given the field the requited rigor and mathematical foundations. This series of lectures will offer a thorough exposure of the theoretical tools that make soft matter amenable to approaches common in theoretical physics. The series will follow the scheme below, which attempts to sketch the hierarchy of topics to be covered, in chronological order.

1. Introduction: general properties of soft matter.
2. Fundamental interactions of colloidal particles; colloid stabilization.
3. The notion of the effective interaction.
4. Basic notions from the theory of uniform fluids.
5. Computer simulations.
6. Nonuniform fluids and density functional theory.
7. Special topics (Asakura-Oosawa model, star polymers, clustering).