Soft Matter

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. They include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, and a number of biological materials. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," 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.

软质或软凝聚物是凝聚物的一个子领域，包含各种物理系统，这些物理系统由于热波动幅度的热应力或机械应力而变形或结构改变。它们包括液体、胶体、聚合物、泡沫、凝胶、颗粒材料、液晶和许多生物材料。这些材料具有一个重要的共同特征，即主要的物理行为发生在与室温热能相当的能量尺度上。在这些温度下，量子方面通常并不重要。Pierre Gilles de Gennes被称为“软物质的奠基人”，在1991年获得诺贝尔物理学奖，因为他发现研究简单系统中有序现象的方法可以推广到软物质中更复杂的情况，特别是液晶和聚合物的行为。