Soft Matter

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Every morning, as you use either your toothpaste or shampoo, you engage with soft matter, materials that flow like liquids under force but hold their shape at rest.

About Soft Matter

• Soft matter, or soft materials, is a sub-field of “condensed matter”, referring to a variety of materials that can be easily deformed or structurally altered by thermal fluctuations or nominal external stress. 
• Soft materials include colloids, polymers, foams, gels, liquid crystals, and many biomaterials. 
• They exhibit many useful and appealing properties, which account for their ubiquity in everyday life, finding use in a diverse range of applications in industry including, food, medical, automotive, construction, transportation, electronics, and manufacturing.
• Everyday examples include curd, toothpaste, shampoo, soap bubbles, and living cells.
• One of the important characteristics of soft matter is their physical structures in the mesoscopic scale. 
• It is the properties and interactions of these structures that determine the overall behavior of the material. 
• Unlike “hard materials” such as metals, ceramics, or glass, the building blocks of soft matter are held together by weak forces. 
• As a result, soft material properties can be markedly affected as a result of small changes in temperature, applied force, time, and environment.

Source: TH

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