Preface
The soft matter research started more than one hundred years ago. Over a century,
the correlated subjects have been examined extensively. People not only keep
updating many new soft matter systems, and renewing the knowledge, but also
looking into the new applications arising from new demands across areas of physics, biology and chemistry.
The systems of soft matter share some common characteristics, such as notable
thermal fluctuations, multiple metastable states, mesoscopic multi-scale
self-assembled structures, entropy-driven order-disorder transitions, macro flexibility. Briefly, these are the systems having “small stimulus, big response” and
displaying strong nonlinearities. These characteristics are not so much related to
their microstructures (at atomic or molecular levels) but more to their mesoscopic
self-assembled structures. These obviously belong to multi-scale complex systems
and certainly are good subjects for complex statistic physics research.
Within the different types of soft matter systems, flexible materials have been
listed as one of the most important materials in recent years, due to the broad
applications to big health and related area.In combination with big data and Ai
technologies, flexible materials and the correlated flexible electronics will reshape
our living and working styles. In this regard, the research efforts on soft materials
are targeting on three main aspects, namely recoverable, multi-functional and
biocompatible. The current major attention from the community is then focused on
the identification and fabrication of new materials with high performance for use in
protonic/electronic devices, environment friendly intelligent building materials with
the applications in chemo-catalysis, drug delivery, gene delivery, biological
imaging and tissue engineering. remote diagnosis related-fields. In particular,
wearable, implantable, bio-degradable/absorbable and injectable flexible devices
will exert a huge impact on human health and daily life.
This book is based on the lectures delivered by international experts in the 2019
International Graduate Summer School on Soft Matter and Non-equilibrium
Physics. The school covers some fundamental aspects and frontier in
non-equilibrium physics and soft matter research. Apart from the basic knowledge
on nonlinear statistic physics, dynamics, computer simulations, and main
v
The soft matter research started more than one hundred years ago. Over a century,
the correlated subjects have been examined extensively. People not only keep
updating many new soft matter systems, and renewing the knowledge, but also
looking into the new applications arising from new demands across areas of physics, biology and chemistry.
The systems of soft matter share some common characteristics, such as notable
thermal fluctuations, multiple metastable states, mesoscopic multi-scale
self-assembled structures, entropy-driven order-disorder transitions, macro flexibility. Briefly, these are the systems having “small stimulus, big response” and
displaying strong nonlinearities. These characteristics are not so much related to
their microstructures (at atomic or molecular levels) but more to their mesoscopic
self-assembled structures. These obviously belong to multi-scale complex systems
and certainly are good subjects for complex statistic physics research.
Within the different types of soft matter systems, flexible materials have been
listed as one of the most important materials in recent years, due to the broad
applications to big health and related area.In combination with big data and Ai
technologies, flexible materials and the correlated flexible electronics will reshape
our living and working styles. In this regard, the research efforts on soft materials
are targeting on three main aspects, namely recoverable, multi-functional and
biocompatible. The current major attention from the community is then focused on
the identification and fabrication of new materials with high performance for use in
protonic/electronic devices, environment friendly intelligent building materials with
the applications in chemo-catalysis, drug delivery, gene delivery, biological
imaging and tissue engineering. remote diagnosis related-fields. In particular,
wearable, implantable, bio-degradable/absorbable and injectable flexible devices
will exert a huge impact on human health and daily life.
This book is based on the lectures delivered by international experts in the 2019
International Graduate Summer School on Soft Matter and Non-equilibrium
Physics. The school covers some fundamental aspects and frontier in
non-equilibrium physics and soft matter research. Apart from the basic knowledge
on nonlinear statistic physics, dynamics, computer simulations, and main
v