Soft Matter Blog

Soft Matter is planning to produce a themed issue on Bridging the gap between hard and soft colloids in 2012. Please e-mail the editorial office, softmatter-rsc@rsc.org,  if you would like to contribute an article.

The Guest Editors of the issue are Professors Dimitris Vlassopoulos (University of Crete, Greece) and Michel Cloitre (ESPCI, France).

With the emergence of soft matter as an important interdisciplinary field of science, combining distinct hallmarks of different systems has become an outstanding challenge. Colloidal hard spheres and polymeric coils represent the two limiting cases of soft matter behaviour with unique, different features: characteristic size, order, origin of stress, confinement. Modern macromolecular chemistry has opened the route for designing and synthesizing soft colloids which encompass properties of both, and hence bridge the gap between hard spheres and polymers. A non-exhaustive list of examples includes end-grafted nanoparticles, block copolymer micelles, multiarm star polymers, microgels, vesicles. Understanding the structure and dynamics of such soft colloids, which are thus very diverse, represents a fascinating challenge for statistical and condensed-matter physics, materials science, biophysics as well as for the industrial applications. Some key questions of fundamental interest concern the nature of the glass and jamming transitions in soft colloids, the rheological behaviour of the glassy suspensions, the effect of solvent, slow dynamics and aging, the role of particle shape and the design of new tailored architectures.

The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is
3rd October 2011
 

Manuscripts can be submitted using the RSC’s on-line submissions service. Please clearly mark that the manuscript is submitted for the themed issue on Bridging the gap between hard and soft colloids.

Please would you inform the editorial office by e-mail at softmatter-rsc@rsc.org as soon as possible if you plan to submit to the issue and whether your contribution will be original research or a review-type article. We would like to have a list of authors who intend to contribute as soon as possible.

The guest editors Mike Cates and Fred MacKintosh introduce this themed issue in their editorial. You can read the full issue here.

Featured on the outside front cover is a paper on Shape- and size-dependent patterns in self-oscillating polymer gels.

The inside front cover highlights the paper Spatial mapping of the mechanical properties of the living retina using scanning force microscopy by Kristian Franze and co-workers. 

The back cover showcases the work of Haiqing Liu and George D. Bachand and their paper Understanding energy dissipation and thermodynamics in biomotor-driven nanocomposite assemblies.

The themed issue also includes a massive 6 hot articles:

Emerging Area: Soft active aggregates: mechanics, dynamics and self-assembly of liquid-like intracellular protein bodies

Communication: Dynamics of a deformable self-propelled particle in three dimensions

Paper: Influence of nano-viscosity and depletion interactions on cleavage of DNA by enzymes in glycerol and poly(ethylene glycol) solutions: qualitative analysis

Paper: Shape- and size-dependent patterns in self-oscillating polymer gels

Paper: Coupled oscillations in a 1D emulsion of Belousov–Zhabotinsky droplets

Paper: Dynamical blebbing at a droplet interface driven by instability in elastic stress: a novel self-motile system

The International Soft Matter Conference 2010 web theme with Juan Colmenero, Dieter Richter and Roque Hidalgo-Alvarez as the guest editors is now online.

Here’s the editorial by Juan Colmenero, Dieter Richter and Roque Hidalgo-Alvarez.  

The web theme includes a lots of interesting reviews, communications and papers including a Hot Review on ‘Complex plasma—the plasma state of soft matter’, Emerging Areas on ‘Single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy: a tool for protein studies approaching cellular environmental conditions’ and ‘Aqueous foams stabilized solely by particles’, and a paper on ‘Scaling between structural relaxation and particle caging in a model colloidal gel‘. 

You can read the full web theme here.

We are delighted to announce a high-profile themed issue on Biomimetic Soft Matter to be published in 2011. Professor Ian Hamley (University of Reading and Diamond Light Source, UK) is the Guest Editor and it is our pleasure to invite you to submit to this themed issue.

It now seems particularly timely to publish a focused set of articles covering new interdisciplinary research on biomimetic soft matter. This area is the subject of considerable international research activity, stimulated by recent developments in synthesis, characterization and modelling methodologies. The issue will feature contributions on the self-assembly of bioinspired peptide and protein constructs, DNA hybrids, biomimetic polymers, bio-inspired templating of inorganic materials, biomimetic cell growth media and tissue scaffolds and many other aspects of this fascinating subject.

The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is 4th April 2011.

Submissions, either communications or full papers, should be high-quality manuscripts of original, unpublished research, containing important new insight. All submissions will be subject to rigorous peer review to meet the usual high standards of Soft Matter. Accepted manuscripts will be shown to the Guest Editor to ensure they are suitable for the scope of the themed issue.

Manuscripts can be submitted using our online submission service. Please state in your covering letter that your article was submitted in response to the Call for Papers for the themed issue on Biomimetic Soft Matter.

Don’t Forget Soft Matter is publishing a themed issue on Dynamics and Rheology of Fluid Interfaces with Professor Gerald Fuller (Stanford University, USA) and Professor Jan Vermant (K.U. Leuven, Belgium) as the Guest Editors.

The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is 15^th February 2011.

Please contact the Editorial Office if you’re interested in contributing to the themed issue on the Dynamics and Rheology of Fluid Interfaces.

Have you read Soft Matter Issue 22? The issue is themed on the Physics of Buckling with Alfred Crosby (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) as the guest editor.

Why should we care about buckling? Alfred Crosby explains in his editorial. You can read the editorial for free, although you may need to register.  

The paper featured on the front cover is High aspect ratio wrinkles on a soft polymer by Sk. Faruque Ahmed, Geon-Ho Rho, Kwang-Ryeol Lee, Ashkan Vaziri and Myoung-Woon Moon. The paper presents a method to pattern polymer surfaces with wrinkles with an amplitude/wavelength ratio as large as 2.5. A novel application of high aspect ratio wrinkles in optics is demonstrated.

Soft Matter issue 20 was part of a themed on tissue engineering. The guest editors for this issue were Molly M. Stevens and Ali Khademhosseini. You can read their editorial here. In it they discuss emerging materials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

The paper featured on the outside front cover was ‘Fibronectin-mimetic peptide-amphiphile nanofiber gels support increased cell adhesion and promote ECM production‘ by Efrosini Kokkoli and co-workers at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.

The inside front cover featured ‘Guiding endothelial progenitor cell tube formation using patterned fibronectin surfaces‘ by Sharon Gerecht and co-workers at Johns Hopkins University, USA.

The papers published in Journal of Materials Chemistry (Issue 40, 2010) as part of the joint themed issue are available here.