Facultat de Física

Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada

A soft matter journey: Emulsions, liquid crystals, colloids, polymer gels, and fire ants

Prof. Alberto Fernandez-Nieves

Department of Condensed Matter Physics. Universitat de Barcelona.

ICREA – Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.

Institute for Complex Systems, Universitat de Barcelona .

This talk will introduce the field of soft condensed matter and highlight why soft matter is indeed soft and why we find it interesting. We will mention a few specific examples and focus on microscopically jiggling particles, colloids, and how you can think of them as large atoms with which to address questions in the field of statistical mechanics and phase transitions. We will then focus on colloidal hydrogels and emphasize their significance and what new ingredients they bring compared to more conventional colloids. When larger in size you enter into the granular realm, and if additionally, the particles are active, you fall out-of-equilibrium and become part of what we call active matter. Our fire-ant work falls in this category. In passing, we will try to present recent work with liquid crystals and topological defects.

Mini bio – Alberto Fernandez-Nieves is an ICREA Professor in Condensed Matter Physics at UB. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech and in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UB, he was a Professor at Georgia Tech for 12 years, and worked at Harvard University as a post-doc and INEST visiting professor. He obtained his BS, MS and PhD in physics from the University of Granada (Spain). His field of expertise is soft condensed matter. He leads the Soft Condensed Matter Lab at UB.