Soft Matter - Science topic

This work presents a novel approach to quantum electrodynamics (QED) through a non perturbative framework. By employing a generalized saddle-point approximation technique inspired by Faddeev-Popov methods, we construct a potential energy surface (PES) that captures quantum fluctuations beyond traditional perturbative or Gaussian methods. The result...

The structural and dynamical properties of soft‐matter systems play an important role in crystallization and nucleation theory. Despite their significance, the dynamical properties are still poorly understood because of experimental constraints and the requirement of performing measurements with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here, we demons...

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant surge in mechanobiological research aimed at elucidating how sub-strate stiffness alters cell biology and the stiffness of multicel-lular systems. Although the concept of 'stiffness, ' is employed to describe the material characteristics of both cells and their substrates, it lacks a precise def...

Correction for ‘Protein–polyelectrolyte complexation: effects of sterically repulsive groups, macromolecular architecture and hierarchical assembly’ by Raman Hlushko et al. , Soft Matter , 2025, 21 , 418–426, https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM01254B.

Meeting the Internet of Things (IoT) demand for flexible organic spintronics requires dynamically flexible, “soft” organic magnetic materials. These materials should be capable of reordering their macroscopic assemblies in response to external stimuli. Unlike conventional rigid, “hard” crystalline organic paramagnets, that are typically composed of...

Active colloidal particles typically exhibit a pronounced affinity for accumulating and being captured at boundaries. Here, we engineer long-range repulsive interactions between colloids that self-propel under an electric field and...

Attaching enzymes to nanostructures has proven useful to the study of enzyme functionality under controlled conditions and has led to new technologies. Often, the utility and interest of enzyme-tethered nanostructures lie in how the enzymatic activity is affected by how the enzymes are arranged in space. Therefore, being able to conjugate enzymes t...

We study a novel alternative approach for the computation of transport coefficients at mesoscales. While standard nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) approaches fix the forcing and measure the average induced flux in the system driven out of equilibrium, the so-called ``stochastic Norton dynamics'' instead fixes the value of the flux and measu...

We investigate in this work the wave characteristics and homogenization theory of soft matter layered structure in the limit of low-frequency P-wave. Using the method of potentials, we derive closed-form dispersion relationship and identify three distinct modes of the soft matter layered structure: quasistatic mode, resonance mode, and slip mode. T...

The stochastic dynamics of a rigid inclusion constrained to move on a curved surface has many applications in biological and soft matter physics, ranging from the diffusion of passive or active membrane proteins to the motion of phoretic particles on liquid-liquid interfaces. Here we construct intrinsic Langevin equations for an oriented rigid incl...

An open challenge in soft matter science is the ability to create hydrogels that are soft but also have high fracture energy. A possible solution to this stiffness-toughness conflict has...

This paper investigates the interaction of an ultra-short, high-intensity laser with a near-critical density hydrogen target, offering valuable insights into how laser intensity, plasma density, and target thickness influence the generation of high-energy proton beams. We report that optimizing target parameters at a fixed laser intensity results i...

Multi-component liquid mixtures can be both complex and fascinating, with some systems being amenable to simple experimentation at home, giving valuable insight into fundamental aspects of bulk and interfacial phase behavior. One particularly interesting mixture is the popular drink ouzo, which has charmed both the general public and scientists by...

Proteinoids, as soft matter fluidic systems, are computational substrates that have been recently proposed for their analog computing capabilities. Such systems exhibit oscillatory electrical activity because of cationic and anionic exchange inside and outside such gels. It has also been recently shown that this (analog) electrical activity, when s...

Active systems comprising micron-sized self-propelling units, also termed microswimmers, are promising candidates for the bottom-up assembly of small structures and reconfigurable materials. Here we leverage field-driven colloidal assembly to induce...

Accurate and non‐destructive detection of material abnormalities inside soft matter remains an elusive challenge due to its variable and heterogeneous nature, especially regarding non‐visual information. Here, a method is introduced that uncovers the physical information of internal material abnormalities from large deformations observed on the sur...

The molecular ordering and defects in self‐assembled soft matter systems are pivotal to their functionality and the advancement of innovative applications. However, achieving precise guidance in the assembly and dynamical modulation of defect structures in an artificial manner remains a formidable challenge in soft matter and interdisciplinary scie...

Though they are also referred to as ‘soft matter’, we designate by ‘complex fluids’ fluids whose microstructure contains specific components (the solute) having sizes and relaxation timescales much larger than those of the atoms/molecules of the ‘simple fluid’ (the solvent) in which they are embedded. The differences between the dynamical behavior...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a promising method for generating high-spatial-resolution images, providing insightful perspectives on the nanomechanical attributes of soft matter, including cells, bacteria, viruses, proteins, and nanoparticles. AFM is widely used in biological and pharmaceutical sciences because it can scrutinize mechanical prope...

Matrix‐vector multiplications are a fundamental building block of artificial intelligence; this essential role has motivated their implementation in a variety of physical substrates, from memristor crossbar arrays to photonic‐integrated circuits. Yet their realization in soft‐matter intelligent systems remains elusive. Herein, A reprogrammable elas...

Deoxyribonucleic Acids (DNA) have been used for a few decades to form nanostructures with precisely tunable features, shapes, responses, etc. Some of the most basic structures, DNA nanostars (DNAns) have been used to form soft matter hydrogels with unique functionalizations and responses to soluble stimuli as well as physical cues. Notably these st...

Lipidic mesophases (LMPs) are lyotropic liquid crystals formed by the self-assembly of lipid in water, offering diverse phase symmetries with unique physicochemical properties. However, a fundamental understanding of how the dynamics relate to the composition and structure remains limited. In this study, we substitute water with glycerol, which clo...

Nanoprecipitation is a versatile, low-energy technique for synthesizing nanomaterials through controlled precipitation, enabling precise tuning of material properties. This review offers a comprehensive and up-to-date perspective on nanoprecipitation, focusing on...

The adhesion/friction interplay continues to be an enigma when soft matter is involved. By utilizing a simple two-stage (loading and then unloading) mixed-type (normal and tangential) indentation testing of a transparent layer of adhesive rubber-like gel material, the normal and tangential contact forces acting on a rigid spherical probe are monito...

T-cells are a crucial subset of white blood cells that play a central role in the immune system. When T-cells bind antigens, it leads to cell activation and the induction of an immune response. If T-cells are activated by antigens in vivo or artificially in vitro, they form multicellular aggregates. The mechanical properties of such clusters provid...

Exploring soft matter systems with high response sensitivity to magnetic fields has been a long‐standing issue, which can realize contactless and non‐destructive modulation of the materials’ properties. 2D material colloids have emerged as promising candidates, while current experiments suggest that their response sensitivity approaches a bottlenec...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a widely used technique for high-resolution imaging and force sensing, yet its performance is fundamentally constrained by the cantilever size, spring constants, and mechanical frequencies. To overcome these limitations, we present a compact and highly efficient single-mode ring resonator-based optomechanical transd...

Correction for ‘Wet spinning of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose–sodium caseinate hydrogel fibres: relationship between rheology and spinnability’ by Lathika Vaniyan et al. , Soft Matter , 2025, https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm00705k.

Controlling the behavior of microswimmers is a major challenge to extract work for novel active matter applications. Geometric confinement is often used for controlling soft matter systems. However, in comparison to the case of Newtonian fluids, the effects of solid interfaces on microswimmers moving through an anisotropic fluid are far less unders...

As the current Section Editor for Soft Matter of Materials, I am delighted to be able to present a Special Issue of the journal:

This work hypothesizes that the gravitational field is not a fundamental interaction but an emergent phenomenon arising from entropic constraints on the degrees of freedom of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) in regions dominated by baryonic matter. Inspired by entropy-driven phenomena in soft matter physics, such as hydrophobic interactions, it...

In soft matter, the polar orientational order of molecules can facilitate the coexistence of structural chirality and ferroelectricity. The ferroelectric nematic (NF) state, exhibited by achiral calamitic molecules with large dipole moments, serves as an ideal model for the emergence of spontaneous structural chirality. This chiral ground state ari...

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics provides a fundamental framework for understanding irreversible processes, energy dissipation, and entropy generation in complex systems. Classical entropy production models rely on local conservation laws and gradient-driven transport mechanisms, which often fail to describe anomalous diffusion, memory effects, and n...

Inspired by the actin‐myosin‐mediated growth mechanisms in skeletal muscle, cyclic crystallization is employed to induce hydrogel self‐growth. Using polyacrylamide‐sodium acetate (PAM‐NaAc) hydrogel as a model system, the crystallization of NaAc triggers the stretching and subsequent fracture of polymer chains, generating mechanoradicals at strain‐...

Mathematical modeling is a powerful tool in rheology, and we present pyRheo, an open-source package for Python designed to streamline the analysis of creep, stress relaxation, small amplitude oscillatory shear, and steady shear flow tests. pyRheo contains a comprehensive selection of viscoelastic models, including fractional order approaches. It in...

Harnessing nanoscale molecular structural changes to achieve precise control over macroscopic devices represents an emerging and effective strategy. One promising approach involves the introduction of light‐driven chiral dopants into liquid crystals (LCs), enabling the fine‐tuned modulation of the helical superstructures in cholesteric liquid cryst...

Fickian yet non-Gaussian diffusion is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed in various biological and soft matter systems. This anomalous dynamics is typically attributed to heterogeneous environments inducing spatiotemporal variations in the diffusivity of tracer particles. While previous studies have predominantly focused on systems exhibiting either...

The KWS-2 small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) diffractometer operated by Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS) at Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum, Garching, Germany, is dedicated to the investigation of mesoscopic multi-scale structures and structural changes due to rapid kinetic processes in soft condensed matter and biophysical systems. Followi...

The field of Cultural Heritage conservation science has seen significant advancements over recent decades, particularly through the application of soft matter and colloid science. Gels, nanostructured fluids, nanoparticles, and other...

As a two-dimensional material at the nanoscale, optical metasurfaces have excellent and flexible optical field control methods. In particular, the application of the concept of bound states in the continuum (BIC) enables optical metasurfaces to achieve resonance effects with high quality factors (Q factor). In comparison to plasmonic metasurfaces,...

Quantum nonreciprocity-a fundamental phenomenon enabling directional control of quantum states and photon correlations-has long been recognized as pivotal for quantum technologies. However, the experimental realization of nonreciprocal quantum photon-pair generation, as a critical prerequisite for advancing quantum systems, continues to be an outst...

The modern era demands multifunctional materials to support advanced technologies and tackle complex environmental issues caused by these innovations. Consequently, material hybridization has garnered significant attention as a strategy to design materials with prescribed multifunctional properties. Drawing inspiration from nature, a multi‐scale ma...

As the emergence of prototissues promotes the evolutionary transformations of protolife, tissue‐like networks derived from cytomimetic systems have been studied by using artificial cells as building blocks to mimic prototissues at a higher organizational level. However, liquid‐like networks originating from liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS), es...

Metallosurfactants combine the unique soft-matter properties of surfactants with magnetic functionalities of metal ions. The inclusion of iron-based species, in particular, can further boost the functionality of the material, owing to iron’s ability to adopt multiple oxidation states and form both high-spin and low-spin complexes. Motivated by this...

Chiral materials can induce spin selectivity (CISS) in electron transport, creating spin-polarization without the need of external magnetic fields. This effect has received attention in chiral soft matter, where symmetries like centrochirality, axial chirality and helical chirality are accessible by molecular design and transform into the specific...

Hand clapping, a ubiquitous human behavior, serves diverse daily-life purposes. Despite prior research, a comprehensive understanding of its physical mechanisms remains elusive. To bridge this gap, we integrate human data, parametric experiments, finite-element simulations, and theoretical frameworks to investigate the acoustic properties of clappi...

In this work, we explored fascinating dynamics at the interface of soft matter and fluid mechanics.

The excess free energy functional of classical density functional theory depends upon the type of fluid model, specifically on the choice of (pair) potential. This functional is unknown in general and is approximated reliably only in special cases. We present a machine learning scheme for training a neural network that acts as a generic metadensity...

Deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA), a type of soft matter, is often considered a promising building block to fabricate and investigate hybrid heterostructures with exotic functionalities. However, at this stage, investigations on DNA-enabled nanoelectronics have been largely limited to zero-dimensional (0D) and/or one-dimensional (1D) structures. Explo...

Yielding of amorphous glasses and gels is a mechanically driven transformation of a material from the solid to liquid state on the experimental timescale. It is a ubiquitous fundamental problem of nonequilibrium physics of high importance in material science, biology, and engineering applications such as processing, ink printing, and manufacturing....

To address nonlinear constitutive relations of rocks containing soft matter such as bitumen, a rigorous rheological model based on Lagrangian mechanics is proposed. The model is general and applies to arbitrary quasi‐static deformations in poroelastic or viscoelastic materials. As an application to bitumen‐rich rock, the model is used for detailed...

The high brilliance of fourth-generation synchrotron sources coupled with advanced X-ray detectors enables a wide range of dynamic studies of colloids and other soft-matter systems. In particular, the higher fraction of coherent flux provided by these new sources is a major boost for X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS). As a result, not on...

We present a novel phenomenological theory describing how topological constraints in prime-knot ring polymers induce collective (cooperative) modes of motion. In low-complexity knots, chain segments can move quasi-independently. However, as the crossing number increases, the ring's degrees of freedom become collectively coupled: distinct arc segmen...

Stimuli‐responsive polymeric vesicles offer a versatile platform for mimicking dynamic cell‐like behaviors for synthetic cell applications. In this study, thermally responsive polymeric droplets derived from poly(ethylene oxide)‐poly(butylene oxide) (PEO‐PBO) polymersomes, aiming to create synthetic cell models that mimic key biological functions a...

When soft matter is driven out of equilibrium its constituents interact via effective interactions that escape Newton's action-reaction principle. Prominent examples include the hydrodynamic interactions between colloidal particles driven in viscous fluids, phoretic interactions between chemically active colloids, and quorum sensing interactions in...

Ionic fluidic devices are gaining interest due to their role in enabling self-powered neuromorphic computing systems. In this study, we present an approach that integrates an iontronic fluidic memristive (IFM) device with low input impedance and a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) based on ferrofluid (FF), which has high input impedance. By incorp...

The oblique helicoidal structure is formed in right-angle cholesterics under the applied electric field. The electric field changes the pitch and cone angle but preserves the single-harmonic modulation of the refractive index. As a result, in such a supramolecular system, we can tune the selective reflection of light in a broad range. Here, we repo...

Oriented locomotion in micro-swimmer populations is commonly observed in response to various stimuli through self-propulsion (taxis). In simple linear orienting fields, swimmers align by rotating with the field. However, their mean locomotion does not always follow the gradient, and the theory for the overall orientational and spatial dynamics of m...

Correction for ‘Room-temperature ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal showing a large and diverging density’ by Charles Parton-Barr et al. , Soft Matter , 2024, 20 , 672–680, https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SM01282D.

Complex fluid interfaces are commonplace in natural and engineered systems and a major topic in the fields of rheology and soft matter physics, providing boundary conditions for a system’s hydrodynamics. The relationship between structure and function dictates how constituents within complex fluids govern flow behavior via constituents changing con...

Integrating nanoparticles (NPs) with liquid crystals has emerged as a contemporary research domain in soft matter. The interplay between the two can substantially transform their properties and dynamics. The study conducted the experiments using nanocomposites of hydrogen-bonded supramolecular calamitic liquid crystals doped with ZnO NPs. It is fou...

Nanostructured materials formed via kinetically controlled self-assembly processes gather more interest nowadays. Bicontinuous emulsion gels stabilized by colloidal particles, called bijels, are attractive materials in soft-matter as they combine bulk properties of two immiscible liquids into an interwoven network structure. The limited understandi...

Bicontinuous geometries, both ordered and amorphous, are commonly found in many soft matter systems. Ordered bicontinuous phases can be modelled by periodic minimal surfaces, including Schoen's (G)yroid or Schwarz' (P)rimitive and (D)iamond surfaces. By contrast, a minimal surface model for amorphous phases has been lacking. Here, we study minimal...

Evidence of discrete acoustic Rayleigh wave turbulence (DARWT) is reported on the free surface of complex viscoelastic materials under monochromatic excitation. These surface elastic non‐linear Rayleigh waves exhibit dispersionless dynamics governed by bulk shear rigidity at coexistence with dispersive capillary waves supported by surface tension....

Correction for ‘Engineering poly(dehydroalanine)-based gels via droplet-based microfluidics: from bulk to microspheres’ by Hannah F. Mathews et al. , Soft Matter , 2024, 20 , 6231–6246, https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM00676C.

Small-angle scattering techniques are indispensable tools for probing the structure of soft materials. However, traditional analytical models often face limitations in structural inversion for complex systems, primarily due to the absence of closed-form expressions of scattering functions. To address these challenges, we present a machine learning...

In soft matter systems, there is a wealth of topological phenomena, such as singular disclination lines and nonsingular defects of skyrmions and hopfions. In a liquid crystal (LC), the topological nature of disclination lines and colloids induces chiral colloidal entanglements. How the chirality of the entanglements is deterministically created and...

Supramolecular functional helical superstructures are typical structures exhibiting many fascinating properties and performances. In nature, cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) are self-assembled soft helical superstructures that display orientation-dependent features of supramolecular helical architectures and have potential scientific applications...

Traumatic events can initiate cavitation within the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the human brain. While the brain is soft [Young’s modulus E ∼ O ( 1 ) kPa], a thin membrane named cranial pia mater [ E ∼ O ( 1 ) MPa] separates the cerebral cortex from the liquid. Here, we reveal the effect of this composite boundary on the damage potential of cav...

Over the past years, rapid progress has been made on soft‐matter electronics for wearable and implantable devices, for bioelectronics and optogenetics. Liquid Metal (LM) based electronics are especially popular, due to their long‐term durability, when subject to repetitive strain cycles. However, one major limitation has been the need for tethering...

Friction‐induced energy consumption is a significant global concern, driving researchers to explore advanced lubrication materials. In nature, lubrication is vital for the life cycle of animals, plants, and humans, playing key roles in movement, predation, and decomposition. After billions of years of evolution, natural lubrication exhibits remarka...

Intelligent soft matter stands at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field seeks to create materials that possess life-like capabilities, such as perception, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior. Unlike traditional materials, wh...

Correction for ‘Topological defects induced by air inclusions in ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals with ionic doping’ by Zhongjie Ma et al. , Soft Matter , 2025, https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01261e.

Correction for ‘ Anoplophora graafi longhorn beetle coloration is due to disordered diamond-like packed spheres’ by Kenza Djeghdi et al. , Soft Matter , 2024, 20 , 2509–2517, https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM00068D.

The demand for sustainable and stretchable thin‐film printed batteries for bioelectronics, wearables, and e‐textiles is rapidly increasing. Recently, we developed a fully 3D‐printed soft‐matter thin‐film Ga‐Ag2O battery with 3R characteristics: resilient to mechanical strain, repairable after damage, and recyclable. This battery achieved a record‐b...

Brownian particles often exhibit biased motion near equilibrium positions influenced by elastic or anti-elastic forces, which either confine the particles to a stable region or drive them away from an unstable equilibrium. Some particles undergo a “memory loss” effect, periodically resetting such equilibrium points. The interplay of forces and equi...

Lipid membranes and membrane deformations are a long-standing area of research in soft matter and biophysics. Computer simulations have complemented analytical and experimental approaches as one of the pillars in the field. However, setting up and using membrane simulations can come with barriers due to the multidisciplinary effort involved and the...

Neutron reflectivity is a powerful technique for probing density profiles in films, with applications across Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. However, challenges arise when dealing with samples characterized by high roughness, unknown scattering length density (SLD) with low contrast, very thin layers, or complex multi-layered structures, that cann...

Soft matter and biological materials are characterized by a complex morphology consisting of multiple structural levels that are either hierarchically organized or coexist over a length scale from a few Å up to the size of µm. For a structural characterization of such morphologies, an extended Q-range must be covered in X-ray and neutron scattering...

Communication and feedback are crucial for the self-organization and the emergent viscoelastic behavior of life-like soft matter systems. However, the specific effects of communication between the individual components on their properties, interactions, and collective dynamics are not fully understood. Here, we report on two-dimensional Brownian dy...

The recently discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid-crystal material DIO exhibits an antiferroelectric (AF) phase, characterized by a sinusoidally modulated structure between the paraelectric (P) and ferroelectric (F) nematic phases. Although these sinusoidal modulated structures associated with the P-AF-F phase sequence is commonly observed in so...

Lamellar phases are essential in various soft matter systems, with topological defects significantly influencing their mechanical properties. In this report, we present a machine-learning approach for quantitatively analyzing the structure and dynamics of distorted lamellar phases using scattering techniques. By leveraging the mathematical framewor...