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Soft Matter

A section of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944).

Section Information

Soft matter is characterized by the key role of entropy and the great variety of phase transitions. As such soft matter forms the basis for future switchable and intelligent materials and devices. The research in soft matter covers among others polymers, liquid crystals, colloids, granular matter, hybrids and active matter, as well as wetting and friction phenomena, soft surfaces and interphases, gels, liquid-liquid phase transitions, and bio-mimetic systems. Due to the emergence of long time scales in many soft matter systems, meta-stability and non-equilibrium phenomena play an important role and can be harnessed in applications and processing. Novel applications and process engineering techniques require the understanding of the materials from the chemical building blocks up to the device level. This also involves numerical methods, computer simulations and emerging concepts of artificial intelligence and machine learning. To enhance our understanding of soft matter in the context of material science the section includes but is not limiting to contributions to

Theoretical, computational and experimental studies of polymers, gels, colloids, wetting and friction phenomena, soft surfaces, active and biomimetic systems
The understanding of phase transitions and phase behavior in soft matter
The understanding of non-equilibrium and meta-stable states in soft matter including applications to device functions and processing
Application of methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning in soft matter and soft materials, processing, and devices