Soft Matter

The term “Soft Condensed Matter” dates back to the ‘90s when the Nobel Laureate Pierre Gilles de Gennes used it to name a large class of systems of practical importance, and not identifiable within any of the classical states of matter (solid, liquid, gas). Typical examples are plastics, rubber, hair, cosmetics, foods, chewing-gum, colloidal systems such as paints, toothpastes, foams and gels … Research in our Department employs a wide spectrum of experimental techniques, some of them only available at Large Scale Facilities, for structural and dynamical characterization (diffraction, spectroscopies, microscopies …) and focuses on food, nano-medicine, complex fluids and arrested systems.