Soft Matter Blog

Lennart Piculell talks to Russell Johnson about his research into charged polymers and surfactants, and discusses what he thinks are the hottest topics in fundamental soft matter research at the moment.

Watch the video interview on YouTube here:

Interested to know more about charged polymers and surfactants? Here’s a selection of Professor Piculell’s articles:

Responsive and evolving mixtures of a hydrolyzing cationic surfactant and oppositely charged polyelectrolytes,
Salomé dos Santos, Dan Lundberg and Lennart Piculell,
Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 5540-5544.

Phase diagrams come alive: understanding how to create, destroy or change ordered surfactant structures by polymerizing the counterions,
Salomé dos Santos, Lennart Piculell, Ola J. Karlsson and Maria da Graça Miguel,
Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 1830-1839. 

Associative phase behaviour and disintegration of copolymer aggregates on adding poly(acrylic acid) to aqueous solutions of a PEO-PPO-PEO triblock copolymer,
Salomé dos Santos, Bob Luigjes and Lennart Piculell,
Soft Matter, 2010, 6, 4756-4767. 

Reverse micelles with spines: L2 phases of surfactant ion—polyion complex salts, n-alcohols and water investigated by rheology, NMR diffusion and SAXS measurements,
Juliana Silva Bernardes, Marcelo Alves da Silva, Lennart Piculell and Watson Loh
Soft Matter, 2010, 6, 144-153.

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.

Jan Vermant talks to Russell Johnson about his research on the rheology of complex fluids, and what he thinks are the hot topics in soft matter research.

Watch the video interview on YouTube here:

Interested to know more? You can read more about Jan Vermant’s research here:

• Electric field controlled capillary traps at water/oil interfaces
• Heterogeneity of the electrostatic repulsion between colloids at the oil–water interface
• Interfacial layers of stimuli-responsive poly-(N-isopropylacrylamide-co-methacrylicacid) (PNIPAM-co-MAA) microgels characterized by interfacial rheology and compression isotherms
• Efficiently suppressing coalescence in polymer blends using nanoparticles: role of interfacial rheology

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.

I am delighted to announce that Professor Christos Likos, University of Vienna, has been appointed as an Associate Editor for Soft Matter.

Christos studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, from which he graduated with a Diploma in 1988. He then joined the Department of Physics at Cornell, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1993, working under the supervision of Neil Ashcroft on density functional theory of freezing and also collaborating with Chris Henley on problems of geometrical packing. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich (1993-94), European Communities Fellow at the University of Trieste (1995-96), and Research Fellow at the Jülich Research Center (1997- 98), before joining the Department of Physics of the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, in which he obtained his Habilitation in Theoretical Physics in 2001. From 2002 to 2003 he was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Cambridge, Department of Theoretical Chemistry, before assuming a Professorship at the Department of Physics at the University of Düsseldorf in August 2003. He has held a visiting professorship at the University of Rome la Sapienza in 2005, as well as visiting scholar positions at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and 2007. From 2007 to 2008, he was Senior Fellow of the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematical Physics in Vienna. As of June 2010, he is Professor (Multiscale Computational Physics) at the Faculty Physics of the University of Vienna.

Christos’ research interests revolve around coarse-graining, structure and dynamics of complex fluids, mainly solutions of colloidal particles and macromolecular aggregates. He is Coordinator of the EU-wide ITN “Physics of Complex Colloids: Equilibrium and Driven” (ITN-COMPLOIDS, http://www.itn-comploids.eu), a joint effort of leading laboratories to analyze the properties of complex fluids in- and out-of-equilibrium.

Christos joins our team of Soft Matter Associate Editors, Darrin Pochan and Lei Jiang. Choose to have your next high impact soft matter paper handled by one of our professional team of Editors in our Cambridge office or one of our Associate Editors by submitting online today!

Sam Safran has been a professor in the Department of Materials and Interfaces of the Weizmann Institute, Israel, since 1990.  He also served as Vice President of the Weizmann Institute and Dean of its Graduate School.  From 1980-1990 he was at the Exxon Corporate Research Labs where he worked on the theory of soft matter with a focus on the structure and phase behavior of oil-water-surfactant dispersions.  His recent research interests have extended soft matter concepts to treat synthetic and biological membranes and cells. 
 
Jian Ping Gong is a professor of the Faculty of Advanced Life Science at Hokkaido University, Japan. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in physics from Zhejiang University, China, and received her Master’s degree in polymer science from Ibaraki University, Japan. She studied high Tc superconductors at Tokyo Institute of Technology where she gained her Doctor of Engineering. She joined the faculty at the Hokkaido University in 1993, where she received her Doctor of Science. Gong presently is concentrating on the research of novel hydrogels with high mechanical performances, such as high toughness, low surface friction, shock-absorbing, self-healing, and the application of the hydrogels as bio-tissues.

A full list of Editorial Board members is available here.

Large-area ordered arrays created by the self-assembly of linear defects in thin smectic-A films have been investigated by a team of Italian and French scientists. The team led by Bruno Zappone and Emmanuelle Lacaze showed that the smectic layers are bent in concentric cylinders and neighboring cylindrical domains are separated by curvature walls. The team say that the domains are centered on virtual singularities, running below the substrate plane, and rest upon a surface region of submicrometric thickness where layers are flat and vertical.

Read the article for free here: Bruno Zappone, Emmanuelle Lacaze, Habib Hayeb, Michel Goldmann, Nathalie Boudet, Philippe Barois and Michel Alba, Soft Matter, 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C0SM00747A (Advance Article)