Kursinformation

An introduction to the theory of soft matter physics, an interdisciplinary field at the interface of physics, biology and chemistry.

This lecture is intended be a first point of contact to key phenomena and concepts of soft matter physics. This encompasses ideas from statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, elasticity and hydrodynamics. The technical level will be rather gentle in favor of covering a broader range of subjects. Thus, the lecture is also accessible to students who are interested in doing experimental work in soft matter adjacent fields such as biophysics.  The goal is to develop sufficient expertise to understand current research in the field on a conceptual level.

Topics:

The focus are areas of soft matter that are not covered in other theory lectures, these are:

Colloids, Liquid Crystals, Polymers, Membranes.

The specific selection of topics will depend on time and participant's interest

Literatur:
There are two nice monographs that try to cover the full breadth of material
van Saarloos, Vitelli, Zeravcic; Soft Matter; Princeton
Doi; Soft Matter Physics; Oxford

As the lecture progresses, more specific literature references will be given.

Voraussetzungen:     

Knowledge of some lecture on statistical physics (e.g. TP4) is helpful and will be assumed. If you do not have this, but are interested, do reach out to the lecturer. The lectures "Klassische Statistik des Nichtgleichgewichts", "Stochastic Processes" (B5) and "Theorie aktiver weicher Materie" (B6) complement this one nicely, but are not prerequisites.

Zielgruppe: Master Students, PhD Candidates