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Concepts, Phenomena,
and Applications
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Published by Princeton University Press
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Names: van Saarloos, Wim, author. | Vitelli, Vincenzo, author. | Zeravcic, Zorana, author.
Title: Soft matter : concepts, phenomena, and applications / Wim van Saarloos, Vincenzo Vitelli,
Zorana Zeravcic.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023030322 (print) | LCCN 2023030323 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691191300 (acid-free paper)
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Contents
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi
Introduction: The Challenges, Relevance, and Fun of Soft Matter . . . . . . . . . 1

I.1 Inspiration from an example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
I.2 Our view of soft matter and our approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
I.2.1 Our approach in this book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
I.2.2 The hydrodynamic perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
I.2.3 A field relevant to society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
I.3 Outline of the book and how to use it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
I Groundwork: from classic results to soft matter today 17
1 Fluid Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.1 The relevance and attractiveness of a continuum description of fluids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2 Hydrodynamics as a balance equation of fluid elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.3 Derivation of the equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.1 The material or convective derivative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.2 Separating out the various components of flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.3.3 Conservation of mass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.3.4 Conservation of momentum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.3.5 Conservation of energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.4 Once more: Reflections on the underlying picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.5 The dissipative terms: Onsager reciprocity relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.6 The stress tensor and heat current for a Newtonian fluid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.6.1 Stress tensor and heat current . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.6.2 The resulting hydrodynamic equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.6.3 Heat diffusion equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.7 Sound waves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.7.1 The equation for sound propagation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.7.2 Analysis of the equation with damping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.8 When can we treat a flow as incompressible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.9 The Navier-Stokes equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.10 The dimensions of physical quantities, dimensionless numbers, and similarity . . . . . . . . . 39
1.10.1 Dimensions of physical quantities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.10.2 The Reynolds number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.10.3 Dimensionless numbers and similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.11 From small to large Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
1.11.1 Low Reynolds number hydrodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
1.11.2 Intermediate Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1.11.3 Very large Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
v
vi Contents
1.12 Lubrication approximation for thin film flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

1.13 Contact angle, coffee stains, and Marangoni flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
1.13.1 Contact angle and wetting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
1.13.2 Coffee stains resulting from enhanced evaporation at the rim of a droplet . . . . . . . 48
1.13.3 Marangoni convection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
1.14 Bubble oscillations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1.15 Droplets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
1.16 What have we learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
1.17 Box 1: Key dimensionless parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
1.18 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2 Elasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.1 Elasticity: A time honored subject with a twist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.2 The strain tensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.3 The linear stress-strain relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.4 The Poisson ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
2.5 Frequency-dependent generalization of the shear modulus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.6 A brief foray into elastodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.6.1 Sound waves in solids: Continuum approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.6.2 Dynamical matrices: Microscopic description of elasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2.7 Bending is the low-energy deformation of sheets and rods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.7.1 Scaling with thickness: Dimensional analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.7.2 Analysis of the strain and energy of a bent sheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2.7.3 Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.8 Static shapes and buckling of rods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.8.1 Geometrical quantities for small deflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.8.2 Buckling of a long rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.8.3 The general force and torque balance equations for static rods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
2.8.4 Equations in the small deflection approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
2.9 Auxetics: Metamaterials with negative Poisson ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
2.10 Packings of particles jammed together: Beyond standard elastic behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
2.10.1 The jamming phase diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.10.2 Counting argument for frictionless spheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.10.3 Scaling of the ratio of elastic constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.10.4 Excess of low-frequency modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.10.5 The crossover length scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
2.10.6 Jammed packings versus disordered crystals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
2.10.7 Toward designer granular matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
2.11 Dislocations and defect-mediated melting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
2.12 Topological mechanics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
2.12.1 Topological waves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.12.2 Topological zero-energy modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.14 Box 2: Summary of Landau theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.15 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
3 Brownian Motion, Thermal Fluctuations, and Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

3.1 A matter of scales and description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Contents vii
3.2 Langevin equation for Brownian motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

3.2.1 Basis of the Langevin equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.2.2 The Langevin equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.2.3 Mean square variations of velocity and position: Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.2.4 The Stokes-Einstein equation for the diffusion coefficient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.2.5 Cutting corners and what we learn from it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
3.3 The Fokker-Planck equation for the probability distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
3.3.1 The Fokker-Planck equation: Equivalence to a Langevin equation . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
3.3.2 The Fokker-Planck equation for the velocity of the Brownian particle . . . . . . . . . . 129
3.3.3 The Fokker-Planck equation for the position of a Brownian particle in
an external potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
3.3.4 The diffusion equation and its Gaussian solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
3.3.5 Self-similarity and self-similar solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
3.3.6 The Kramers problem: Fluctuation-driven escape over a barrier . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
3.4 The master equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.5 Size matters for diffusion and dispersion of Brownian particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
3.5.1 Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
3.5.2 Dispersions versus granular media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3.6 Probing fluctuations and taking advantage of them as a probe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.6.1 Measuring force constants of biomatter experimentally . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.6.2 Directed Brownian motion of molecular motors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.6.3 Bending modulus or surface tension from shape fluctuation measurements . . . . . . 139
3.6.4 Thermal fluctuations in a buckling colloidal chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.7 Probing soft matter with scattering techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.7.1 Essentials of scattering experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.7.2 Probing small fluctuations in continuum systems with laser light scattering . . . . . . 144
3.9 Box 3: Calculating thermal averages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
3.10 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
II Soft Matter Phases 161
4 Colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.1 Colloidal dispersions and emulsions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.1.1 Colloids: Fundamental studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.1.2 Colloids: Application perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.2 Colloids as a thermodynamic system with effective interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
4.2.1 Hard core particles: Model system with entropic interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
4.2.2 Colloids tend to attract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4.3 Naturally occurring attractive forces between colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4.3.1 The Van der Waals attraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.3.2 Depletion interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.3.3 Induced attractive interaction due to perturbations of the surrounding medium . . . . 170
4.4 Repulsive forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.4.1 Electrostatic stabilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.4.2 Steric stabilization by grafting polymers on the surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
4.5 Playing with colloids as model systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.5.1 Colloidal aggregates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
viii Contents
4.5.2 From spheres, rods, and plates to cubes and beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.5.3 The use of colloidal crystals to make optical bandgap materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
4.5.4 Colloidal glasses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
4.5.5 Colloidal motifs as the building blocks of designer matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.5.6 Colloids as active matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.6 Non-Newtonian rheology of colloidal dispersions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
4.6.1 Shear thinning and shear thickening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
4.6.2 A temporal transition due to competition between aging and rejuvenation . . . . . . . 184
4.6.3 Comparison with emulsions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
4.6.4 Flow of granular media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
4.8 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
5 Polymers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
5.1 The ever-broadening field of polymer science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
5.2 Polymers: Long chain molecules with many accessible conformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
5.3 Ideal chains, excluded volume effects, and the Flory argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.3.1 The ideal chain model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.3.2 Excluded volume interaction and self-avoiding walks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
5.3.3 The Flory argument for the excluded volume interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
5.3.4 Taking stock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
5.4 The wormlike chain model for biopolymers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
5.4.1 The wormlike chain model and its persistence length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
5.4.2 Charge effects on the persistence length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
5.4.3 Why excluded volume effects are small . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
5.4.4 The force-extension curve of the WLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
5.5 Polymers in solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
5.5.1 The dilute regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
5.5.2 From semi-dilute to concentrated solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
5.5.3 Concentrated solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
5.6 Polymer brushes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
5.7 Flory-Huggins mean-field theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
5.7.1 Flory-Huggins approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
5.7.2 Flory-Huggins as a mean-field theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.8 Response of biopolymer networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.8.1 Biopolymer networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.8.2 The slack or thermal-fluctuation-induced contraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
5.8.3 The stress-strain response of a network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
5.8.4 Beyond the simple approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
5.9 Reptation and the viscosity of polymer melts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
5.9.1 The polymer viscosity plays only a limited role in several relevant flow effects . . . . . 238
5.9.2 Reptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
5.10 Non-Newtonian rheology of polymer solutions and melts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
5.10.1 Importance of polymer stretching effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
5.10.2 The dimensionless Weissenberg number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
5.10.3 The Oldroyd-B and upper convected Maxwell model for polymer rheology . . . . . . 242
5.10.4 Polymer flow instabilities due to hoop stresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
5.12 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Contents ix
6 Liquid Crystals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

6.1 Liquid crystals as mesophases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
6.1.1 A bewildering variety of liquid crystal phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
6.1.2 Molecular liquid crystals versus colloidal liquid crystal phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.1.3 The power of coarse-graining in the spirit of Landau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
6.1.4 The director field n̂ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
6.2 Landau–de Gennes approach to the isotropic-nematic transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
6.3 Frank energy expression for the nematic director field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
6.3.1 The Frank free energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
6.3.2 Splay, twist, and bend distortions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
6.3.3 Boundary conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
6.4 Analysis of equilibrium solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.5 Switching the director with a field: The Fréedericksz transition and LCDs . . . . . . . . . . . 273
6.5.1 The Fréedericksz transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
6.5.2 Liquid crystal displays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
6.6 Topological defects in the director orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
6.6.1 Defects in the director field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
6.6.2 Visualization of defects in thin samples between crossed polarizers . . . . . . . . . . . 279
6.6.3 Interaction of defects in two dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
6.7 Nematohydrodynamics based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
6.8 Playing with the molecular shape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
6.9 Opportunities and challenges at interfaces with other fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
6.9.1 Biological liquid crystals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
6.9.2 Liquid crystals in droplets and other confined geometries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
6.9.3 Colloidal liquid crystals and beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
6.9.4 Mesophases of lipid molecules relevant to pharmaceutics, cosmetics,
and food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
6.9.5 Epithelial cells die and disappear near +1/2 defects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
6.10 Renormalization group analysis of the defect unbinding transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
6.10.1 Statistical mechanics of a gas of Coulomb charges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
6.10.2 The idea behind the RG calculation: Screening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
6.10.3 Setting up the RG calculation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
6.10.4 How to derive the renormalization group flow relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
6.10.5 Critical scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
6.12 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
7 Interfaces, Surfaces, and Membranes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

7.1 Fluid interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
7.2 Helfrich free energy for membranes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
7.3 Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
7.4 Crumpling of membranes and sheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
7.4.1 A crumpling transition in thermal systems? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
7.4.2 Athermal crumpling by compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
7.5 A soft matter realization of the one-dimensional KPZ equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
7.7 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
x Contents
III Advanced Topics 349
8 Pattern Formation out of Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

8.1 Spontaneous pattern formation resulting from instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.2 Gearing up for studying patterns in spatially extended systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
8.2.1 The pitchfork bifurcation of dynamical systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
8.2.2 The Swift-Hohenberg model equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
8.2.3 Supercritical versus subcritical transitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
8.3 Inspiration: Rayleigh-Bénard convection and Turing patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
8.3.1 The Rayleigh-Bénard instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
8.3.2 Turing instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362
8.4 Three types of linear instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
8.5 Amplitude equations for stationary type I instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
8.5.1 Inspiration from a simple perturbative calculation for
the Swift-Hohenberg equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
8.5.2 Amplitude equation in one dimension for σq real . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
8.5.3 Two-dimensional patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
8.6 Dynamics just above a type II instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
8.7 Amplitude equations for oscillatory type I instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
8.7.1 Amplitude equations for one-dimensional traveling waves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
8.7.2 Dominant structures: Sources and sinks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
8.7.3 What about two and higher dimensions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
8.8 Amplitude equations for type III instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
8.9 Taking stock on pattern formation and the amplitude description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
8.9.1 Box 4: Summary of insights from amplitude equation approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
8.9.2 Pattern selection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
8.10 Excitable media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
8.10.1 The basic mechanism of excitable media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
8.10.2 Excitable waves in chemical systems, nerves, and beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
8.12 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
9 Active Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405

9.1 Hydrodynamic theories of active matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
9.2 Flocking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
9.2.1 The Vicsek model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
9.2.2 Flocking and the Mermin-Wagner theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
9.2.3 Toner-Tu theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
9.3 Motility-induced phase separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
9.3.1 Active Brownian particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
9.3.2 The mechanism behind the instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
9.4 Bacterial suspensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
9.5 Active nematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
9.5.1 Active nemato-hydrodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
9.5.2 Transition to chaos and topological defects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
9.5.3 Self-propulsion of topological defects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
9.6 Active solids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
9.6.1 Moving and self-propelled solids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
9.6.2 Odd elasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420
Contents xi
9.6.3 Odd elastodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424

9.7 Chiral active fluids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
9.7.1 Hydrodynamics of self-spinning particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
9.7.2 Odd viscosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426
9.8 Nonreciprocal phase transitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
9.8.1 Chiral phases in nonreciprocal active matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
9.8.2 Nonreciprocal pattern formation: A case study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
9.8.3 Exceptional points and parity-breaking bifurcations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
9.8.4 Exceptional points-induced instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
9.9 Applications to biological problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
9.9.1 Active gels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
9.9.2 Active matter effects during morphogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
9.9.3 Tissue mechanics and vertex models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
9.11 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
IV Perspective: new frontiers of soft matter 461
10 From Designing Matter to Mimicking Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463

10.1 Designer matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464
10.1.1 What we mean by designer matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464
10.1.2 Basic concepts and definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464
10.1.3 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467
10.2 Memory formation in matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
10.2.1 Types of memories in matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
10.2.2 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476
10.3 Artificial intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
10.3.1 Types of machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
10.3.2 Neural network architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
10.3.3 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486
10.4 Artificial life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
10.4.1 What do we mean by artificial life? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
10.4.2 Additional concepts and glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490
10.4.3 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493
Appendix: Notation and Symbols Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535
Image Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581
Figures
Introduction
I.1 1991 Nobel Prize citation for P.-G. de Gennes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I.2 A range of soft matter behavior obtained by modifying a colloidal particle . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
I.3 The original drawing of Perrin showing Brownian motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
I.4 Illustration of an experiment in which one pulls on DNA with an optical trap . . . . . . . . . . 3
I.5 A fractal aggregate grown in a petri dish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
I.6 Illustration of shear thinning and shear thickening behavior of colloidal dispersions . . . . . . 4
I.7 Cornstarch: Its microstructure and illustration of the possibility of walking on it . . . . . . . . . 5
I.8 Illustration of the microstructure of paint and mayonnaise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
I.9 Modern techniques allow one to probe the strain response of a colloidal packing . . . . . . . . 6
I.10 The relaxation time of polydisperse colloids diverges on approaching the glass transition . . . 6
I.11 Hard core polyhedra can form all kinds of interesting phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
I.12 Playing with the interactions allows one to make self-assembly strongly directed . . . . . . . . 7
I.13 Flow of a granular packing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
I.14 Microtubules and molecular motors are active matter with liquid crystal–like ordering . . . . . 8
I.15 Illustration of the hydrodynamic perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter 1
1.1 Liquid and gas phases of atoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2 Illustration of coarse-graining and the scales of hydrodynamic phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3 Euler’s article from 1757 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.4 The Lagrangian and Eulerian descriptions of a fluid element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.5 Illustration of various types of flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.6 Illustration of the various components of the stress tensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.7 Swimming bacteria as an example of an active fluid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.8 Behavior of long polymers in simple shear flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.9 Onsager relations illustrated with the Peltier and Seebeck effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.10 Illustration of various ways to analyze a linear mode with damping in space or time . . . . . . 35
1.11 Taylor-Couette flow and its rich phase diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.12 Osborne Reynolds in the lab probing the transition to turbulence in pipe flow . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.13 Flow past a cylinder at different Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.14 Illustration of flow reversal at small Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1.15 Illustration of the various flow regimes for increasing Reynolds numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1.16 Cloud formation pattern resulting from the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1.17 Simulations of the vorticity generated by a dragonfly wing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
1.18 Sketch of a thin layer in the discussion of the lubrication approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
1.19 Entrainment of air under a liquid droplet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
1.20 Contact angle, wetting, and Marangoni flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
1.21 Water droplets on a plant’s leaf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
1.22 Coffee stains due to enhanced evaporation of the droplet at the rim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
1.23 Bubble oscillations in soft matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
xiii
xiv List of Figures
1.24 A bouncing droplet due to Marangoni flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

1.25 Illustration of streamlines and a streamtube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
1.26 A fluid element moving with a streamtube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
1.27 Basic setup for the Rayleigh-Taylor and Kelvin-Helmholtz stability calculations . . . . . . . . . 60
1.28 Simulations of a fluid interface exhibiting the Rayleigh-Taylor instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
1.29 Lubrication approximation for flow between two spheres approaching each other . . . . . . . . 65
Chapter 2
2.1 Illustration of the natural tendency of an auxetic to bend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.2 Buckling patterns in a bilayer system in which the substrate layer is initially prestressed . . . . 68
2.3 Illustration of the spontaneous curvature of a bilayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.4 A dried apple gets wrinkled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.5 Illustration of the change of position of material elements of a solid under stress . . . . . . . . . 69
2.6 Fluctuations of a graphene sheet cause quite a bit of energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.7 Stretching of a bar in the analysis of the Poisson ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
2.8 Cork, a material with a Poisson ratio of about zero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.9 Evolution of the Poisson ratio of various rubbery polymers with time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.10 Dynamic modulus of an ultrasoft elastopolymer gel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.11 The Maxwell model and the Kelvin-Voigt model for time-dependent response . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.12 A stretched and bent sheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.13 A bent sheet or rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2.14 A thin sheet spontaneously wrapping around a droplet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.15 Examples of wrinkling sheets due to coupling of stretching and bending . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.16 A bent paper sheet can support a weight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.17 Geometry of a curved line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.18 The buckling instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.19 The similarity of the buckling transition with the Landau theory of phase transitions . . . . . . 84
2.20 The scaling of tree height with trunk thickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
2.21 Da Vinci’s experiments on the bending of beams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
2.22 The elastic torque associated with a bent sheet or rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
2.23 Illustration of microtubules, the cellular ’rails’ of micromotors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
2.24 A basic structure showing auxetic behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
2.25 Auxetic and programmable soft matter structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
2.26 Response of a metamaterial with two types of holes for different prestrains . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.27 Differences in forces between molecules and small particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
2.28 Many soft matter systems consist of particles with strong repulsive forces . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.29 The jamming phase diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.30 Illustration of jamming by increasing the density of polydisperse disks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.31 Variation of the ratio of elastic constants upon approaching the isostatic point at jamming . . . 95
2.32 The evolution of the density of states upon approaching the jamming point . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.33 Lowest-frequency eigenmodes at and far above the jamming point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
2.34 Evolution of the ratio µ/K of elastic networks upon pruning various types of bonds . . . . . . 97
2.35 Optimization of the shape of motifs in a granular packing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
2.36 The Burgers vector and two bound defects on a triangular lattice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.37 Colloidal experiment showing the transition from solid to hexatic and liquid phase in 2D . . . 101
2.38 A gyroscope lattice with a vibrational edge mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.39 Topological zero-energy edge modes in a mechanical structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
2.40 Triangular and honeycomb lattices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
List of Figures xv
2.41 Dislocations and disclinations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Chapter 3
3.1 Illustration of a Brownian particle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.2 Sketch of white noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.3 Mean square displacement h( ∆X (t)2 )i of colloidal particles of various size . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.4 Evolution of the probability distribution in phase space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
3.5 Title and abstract of the original paper of Kramers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
3.6 The potential U (X ) in the case of the Kramers problem of escape over a barrier . . . . . . . . . 132
3.7 Illustration of the transition probabilities in the master equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.8 Density matching in a colloidal system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.9 Extraction of the force on DNA from the fluctuations of the bead attached to it . . . . . . . . . . 137
3.10 Experiment allowing us to pull and twist a DNA strand with a magnetic particle . . . . . . . . 137
3.11 Illustration of the hand-over-hand and inchworm motion of Brownian motors . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.12 Steps and fluctuations of molecular motors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
3.13 Various membrane shape fluctuations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.14 Buckling of a colloidal chain under compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.15 Illustration of the setup of a scattering experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
3.16 Light-scattering spectrum of water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
3.17 Interchanging the order of the integrals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
3.18 Fermi acceleration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Chapter 4
4.1 The tobacco mosaic virus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.2 Collage of colloidal particles of various shapes and sizes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.3 Dipole fluctuations leading to the Van der Waals interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.4 The depletion interaction illustrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.5 Attraction between two colloids at a fluid interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
4.6 Charge screening of colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.7 The DLVO interaction between colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
4.8 Steric repulsion resulting from grafting colloids with polymers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.9 Diffusion-limited aggregation clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
4.10 Schematic behavior of the scattering intensity S (q ) of DLA clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
4.11 Measured scattering intensity S (q ) from fractal aggregates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.12 Colloidal particles with the shape of a rounded cube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.13 A colloidal crystal and a photonic bandgap material made from a colloidal crystal . . . . . . . 177
4.14 Colloidal glasses as a model system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
4.15 Viscosity of a polydisperse colloidal dispersion as a function of volume fraction . . . . . . . . . 179
4.16 Functional colloidal motifs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.17 Colloidal particles coated with DNA patches to give directional bonding . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.18 The workhorse of active colloids: The Janus particle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.19 A kaleidoscope of ways of making and manipulating active colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
4.20 Colloidal dispersions as complex fluids: Non-Newtonian rheological behavior . . . . . . . . . . 183
4.21 Snapshot of cluster formation in colloid rheology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
4.22 Bifurcation behavior of the viscosity of a bentonite solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
4.23 Scaling plot of the stress versus shear rate near the jamming point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
4.24 An example of the friction coefficient of granular media as a function of the shear rate . . . . . 188
xvi List of Figures
4.25 Typical interaction potential between colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

4.26 Two semi-infinite slabs attracting via the Van der Waals interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
4.27 Two spheres and the calculation of the Derjaguin approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
4.28 Interaction between lock and key colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
4.29 Regular fractals: The Koch curve and Sierpinki gasket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
4.30 The percolation transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
4.31 Coarse-graining a one-dimensional model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
4.32 Self-similarity in the percolation transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
4.33 Renormalization group for 2D percolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Chapter 5
5.1 Polyethylene and polystyrene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
5.2 Illustration of vitrimers, and self-healing of a rubbery supramolecular polymer . . . . . . . . . 204
5.3 Trans and gauche conformations of polyethylene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
5.4 Illustration of different conformations of a short piece of a polymer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
5.5 AFM picture of DNA on a surface with a persistence length of about 50 nm . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.6 The ideal chain model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.7 Illustration of random walks and self-avoiding walks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
5.8 Interaction of a monomer with the average number of monomers in a ball around it . . . . . . 211
5.9 The Flory free energy as a function of the polymer radius R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
5.10 The DNA molecule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
5.11 The organization of the DNA molecule on various length scales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
5.12 Illustration of the power of DNA technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
5.13 The excluded volume of two thin rods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
5.14 Sketch of DNA at large pulling force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
5.15 Force-extension curve of DNA fitted with the wormlike chain expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
5.16 Measuring the force-extension curve of overstretched DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
5.17 Neutron-scattering intensity S (q ) for deuterated polystyrene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
5.18 Illustration of the dilute regime and the crossover to the semi-dilute regime . . . . . . . . . . . 224
5.19 The crossover length ξφ and the blob picture in the semi-dilute regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5.20 Neutron-scattering data from polystyrene at various concentrations above c∗ . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5.21 Scaling plot of the osmotic pressure of polymer solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
5.22 Sketch of a polymer brush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
5.23 Sketch of the Flory-Huggins free energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.24 Phase diagram of diblock copolymers as obtained from Flory-Huggins mean-field theory . . . 231
5.25 Phase diagram of diblock copolymers with fluctuation effects included . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
5.26 Biopolymer networks and their response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
5.27 The force-extension curve of a biopolymer in a network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
5.28 Illustration of polymer stretching in a network under affine strain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
5.29 Differential elastic modulus of actin filament networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
5.30 Illustration of an athermal network under shear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
5.31 Illustration of the reptation process of polymer relaxation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
5.32 Illustration of reptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
5.33 The viscosity as a function of degree of polymerization for several polymer melts . . . . . . . . 240
5.34 Surprising demonstrations of the non-Newtonian rheology of polymers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
5.35 Illustration of hoop stresses due to curved streamlines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
5.36 The Oldroyd-B and upper convected Maxwell model represent dumbbells . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
5.37 Examples of viscoelastic flow instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
List of Figures xvii
5.38 Stress as a function of shear rate in viscoelastic flow driven by a rotating disk . . . . . . . . . . 246
5.39 Illustration of the coordinates and distances in the Odĳk length calculation . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
5.40 Schematic illustration of a serpentile channel used to study viscoelastic flow instabilities . . . . 255
5.41 Critical Weissenberg number for viscoelastic flow in serpentine channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
5.42 Polymer melt transforming into a crosslinked melt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Chapter 6
6.1 The nematic, smectic, and cholesteric liquid crystal phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
6.2 Phase diagram of hard core spherocylinders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
6.3 Discotic molecules and liquid crystal phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
6.4 Illustration of the liquid crystal blue phase II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.5 Illustration of the director as a coarse-grained orientation field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
6.6 Illustration of the microscopic origin of the n̂ ↔ −n̂ symmetry of the nematic phase . . . . . . 264
6.7 Form of the Landau–de Gennes free energy near the isotropic-nematic transition . . . . . . . . 267
6.8 Inverse of the light-scattering intensity of 8CB and MBBA as a function of temperature . . . . . 267
6.9 Splay, twist, and bend distortions of a nematic liquid crystal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
6.10 The homeotropic and homogeneous boundary conditions of a liquid crystal . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.11 The magnetic field Fréedericksz transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
6.12 Illustration of a pixel of an LCD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
6.13 Two nematic disclinations with s = 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
6.14 The two half-integer disclinations and s=−1 defect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
6.15 Topological point defects in nematics: Hedgehogs and boojums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
6.16 How liquid crystal defects show up between crossed polarizers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
6.17 Illustration of the rotation direction of the Schlieren image of defects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
6.18 Schlieren image of a pair of surface boojums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
6.19 Polar wedge-shaped liquid crystal molecules forming splayed striped domains . . . . . . . . . 284
6.20 Illustration of the flexoelectric effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
6.21 Elecron micrograph of the fd virus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
6.22 Liquid crystal droplets with boojums or a hedgehog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
6.23 A Janus particle coupled to a nematic field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
6.24 Micelles and inverse micelles formed by lipid molecules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
6.25 The magic lipid monoolein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
6.26 Lipidic mesophases of various dimensionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
6.27 Nematic order and defects in epithelial cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
6.28 Illustration of the screening of elastic constants by defect pairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
6.29 Renormalization group flows of the 2D Coulomb gas system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
6.30 Escape of the director in the third dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
6.31 Illustration of a crystalline, a columnar, and a smectic phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Chapter 7
7.1 Sketch of a red blood cell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
7.2 Sketch of a bilayer membrane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
7.3 The two radii of curvature of a surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
7.4 Illustration of the genus of a closed surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
7.5 Bifurcations and evolution of membrane shapes according to the Helfrich model . . . . . . . . 314
7.6 The adenovirus and salmonella phage virus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
7.7 A large flat triangular net with a disclination can release its strain by buckling . . . . . . . . . . 317
xviii List of Figures
7.8 The energy of a flat elastic shell with a disclination and that of a cone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
7.9 Asphericity of viruses as a function of their radius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
7.10 A piece of crumpled paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
7.11 Crumpling transition of a tethered surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
7.12 Compression experiment on crumpling of paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
7.13 Results of a numerical study of crumpling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
7.14 Curvature and facets of weakly and strongly compacted Mylar sheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
7.15 KPZ scaling of growing interfaces in nematic electroconvection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
7.16 Experiments and simulations of the propagating Rayeigh instability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
7.17 Sketch of a wetting front . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
7.18 The derivation of the Euler formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
7.19 Curved space crystals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
7.20 A phase separated system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
Chapter 8
8.1 Top view of Bénard-Marangoni cells at the surface of a fluid heated from below . . . . . . . . . 351
8.2 Sketch of the amplitude concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.3 The flow dynamics of a variable u governed by a simple ordinary differential equation . . . . . 352
8.4 Sketch of the pitchfork bifurcation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
8.5 The dispersion relation of linear modes in the Swift-Hohenberg equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
8.6 Evolution of the energy in a simulation of the Swift-Hohenberg equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
8.7 Supercritical and subcritical bifurcations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
8.8 Sketch of a Rayleigh-Bénard cell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
8.9 The dispersion relation of the Rayleigh-Bénard problem with slip boundary conditions . . . . . 359
8.10 Rayleigh-Bénard patterns evolve with distance from threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
8.11 Range of existence of stable static convection patterns in Rayleigh-Bénard convection . . . . . . 361
8.12 Summary of the Turing stability diagram of two coupled reaction diffusion equations . . . . . . 364
8.13 Turing patterns observed in chemical reactors and in the Min protein system . . . . . . . . . . . 366
8.14 The three possible instability scenarios of spatially extended systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
8.15 Scaling of growth rate and instability band of finite wavelength instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . 370
8.16 Sketch of the band of periodic solutions as a function of ǫ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
8.17 Sketch of the stability of phase winding solutions above threshold in one dimension . . . . . . 374
8.18 Sketch of σ (q ) for a rotationally symmetric two-dimensional system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
8.19 The stability balloon for stripe patterns according to the lowest order amplitude equation . . . 375
8.20 Illustration of the origin of the phase instabilities of stripe patterns in two dimensions . . . . . 376
8.21 Various regular patterns and their dominant modes near threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
8.22 The three unit vectors used to describe hexagonal patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
8.23 Hexagonal pattern observed just below threshold in a Rayleigh-Bénard experiment . . . . . . . 379
8.24 Autocorrelation patterns in the neural response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
8.25 Simulation of the one-dimensional Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
8.26 Chaotic dynamics in one-dimensional hydrothermal waves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382
8.27 Sources and sinks in a heated wire experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
8.28 Illustration of sources and sinks in traveling wave systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
8.29 Illustration of a domain wall solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
8.30 A simulation of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation in two dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . 385
8.31 The stability balloon of vegetation patterns in Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
8.32 The nullclines of the Turing model which give rise to excitable medium behavior . . . . . . . . 390
8.33 Time dependence of the fields of an excitable dynamical system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
List of Figures xix
8.34 A propagating pulse in an excitable medium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

8.35 Example of excitable waves in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
8.36 The signal of the propagation of a nerve pulse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
8.37 Symmetry of flow patterns in the Boussinesq approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Chapter 9
9.1 A gallery of active matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
9.2 A flock of birds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
9.3 Vicsek model simulations for various densities and noise strengths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
9.4 Flocking behavior observed for Quincke rotation of colloidal particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
9.5 The effective potential in the Toner-Tu theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
9.6 Numerical simulations of motility-induced phase separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
9.7 Experimental verification of motility-induced phase separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
9.8 Bacterial suspensions exhibit swarming, turbulence, and a vanishing viscosity . . . . . . . . . . 414
9.9 Run and tumble behavior of bacteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
9.10 Illustration of the role of defects in producing active turbulence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
9.11 Induced flow field around ± 12 defects in an active nematic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
9.12 Three examples of active solids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
9.13 Observation of starfish embryos which self-organize into living chiral crystals . . . . . . . . . . 420
9.14 Examples of metamaterials in which odd elasticity plays a role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
9.15 A spring with odd-elastic response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
9.16 Layers of a colloidal chiral fluid exhibit instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
9.17 Effect of nonreciprocal interactions on flocking models and pattern formation . . . . . . . . . . 428
9.18 Space-time plots of nonreciprocally coupled Swift-Hohenberg models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
9.19 Perturbative phase diagram of the exceptional transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
9.20 Schematic bifurcation diagram of the exceptional transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
9.21 Exceptional points-induced instabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
9.22 Sketch of an active gel composed of actin filaments and myosin motors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
9.23 Shape of a dividing cell compared to an active gel model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
9.24 Topological defects in a regenerated Hydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
9.25 Myosin flow on the surface of a Drosophila embryo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
9.26 A machine learning model analysis of tissue flow in Drosophila . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
9.27 Sketch of a vertex model for cell dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
9.28 The Vicsek model for nonmoving birds as a noisy spin model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
9.29 Example of an active flow driven by the director field in an active nematic . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
9.30 Simplified cell division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458
Chapter 10
10.1 Building blocks of designer matter from the nano scale to the macro scale . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
10.2 3D printing on the macro scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
10.3 Illustration of a thermal cloak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
10.4 A granular architecture, an ultra-lightweight material, and an allosteric network . . . . . . . . . 467
10.5 Illustration of two different lattice structures related by duality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
10.6 An extremely stretchable hydrogel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
10.7 A self-folding origami made with the aid of a hydrogel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
10.8 Digital alchemy: Design of novel crystal structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
10.9 Colloidal crystals made from DNA-coated colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
xx List of Figures
10.10 Design principles for self-assembly of rigid structures made of eight particles . . . . . . . . . . 470
10.11 Nanostructures made from Lego-like DNA bricks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
10.12 Virus shells made from DNA origami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
10.13 Illustration of hysteresis and the concept of hysterons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
10.14 Illustration of the concept of return-point memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
10.15 Memory behavior resulting from cyclic driving of a sheared particle system . . . . . . . . . . . 473
10.16 Training, retrieval, and capacity of an associative neural network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476
10.17 Robust pathways in a cyclically compressed corrugated sheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
10.18 Training and memory effects in a cyclic-driven colloidal dispersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
10.19 Illustration of path reversal in viscous liquid for small Reynolds number . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478
10.20 Self-assembling memories and their phase diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
10.21 Relation of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
10.22 Supervised machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
10.23 Unsupervised machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
10.24 A general scheme of an intelligent agent interacting with its environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
10.25 Illustration of dense and convolutional neural networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
10.26 Illustration of a recurrent neural network and the autoencoder architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
10.27 Machine learning enhanced computational fluid dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486
10.28 Machine learning active nematic hydrodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488
10.29 Machine learning cell forces and illustration of intelligent grains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
10.30 Enzymatic neural network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
10.31 Self-replicating DNA origami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493
10.32 Self-replication and catalysis with DNA-coated colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
10.33 Design of a dimer catalyst that helps cleave a bond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495
10.34 Folding of a colloidomer chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 496
10.35 Folding of magnetic handshake materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
10.36 Trans-membrane transport in colloidal cell-mimics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498
10.37 Evolution of soft robots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498
Preface
This book grew out of our experience teaching introductory courses on soft matter in
Leiden and Chicago. The challenge in Leiden was to develop a course aimed at first-
year master’s students, students who just have completed a three-year bachelor degree
in physics or a related field. They have a diverse background and will choose their
specialization and decide whether to go into theoretical or experimental physics only
some time after taking the course. The Chicago course targets beginning graduate
students, but with similarly diverse backgrounds and interests.
Many colleagues we consulted about teaching soft matter from a physics perspective
struggled with the same dilemma we faced: how to develop a course which introduces
some of the basic concepts developed in the previous century, but which at the same
time gives a feel for some of the exciting research questions these days, as well as for
the revolutionizing new opportunities offered by modern visualization techniques
and digital analysis. Moreover, for many of us the charm of soft matter is its diversity,
the fact that it cannot simply be treated on the basis of a single overarching theoretical
framework, and that it pays to have an intuitive understanding of many different
approaches and materials. How can we bring across the necessity, power, and fun
of being able to shift perspectives and to bring knowledge from various disciplines
to bear on a problem? We found ourselves combining bits and pieces from several
classical introductions to the field and from books focused on a particular phase of
soft matter, excerpts from literature on applications and present-day research topics,
and our own lecture notes.
This book reflects our teaching approach and philosophy: it is intended to be essen-
tially the type of book we would have liked to have available as a basis for the courses
we developed. In short, we have tried to write a somewhat different introductory
textbook on the basic concepts of soft matter. Its aim is to give advanced undergrad-
uate and beginning graduate students an introductory overview of the various soft
matter phases and their rheology, and the conceptual framework to analyze them. We
have attempted to choose our approach and topics in such a way that students who
specialize in other sub-disciplines will acquire a good overview of the field, and get
familiar with concepts and treatments that have broader application. Moreover, as
students and researchers nowadays are motivated more than ever to pay attention to
possible applications of their insights and methods, in both science and technology,
we pay attention to the large range of applications. For students who continue in soft
matter research, the book should be a stepping stone for further specialization, while
for students whose main research focus is in biomatter or at the interface of physics
with biology, this book should give them the necessary background to understand
the application of soft matter physics concepts in biology. We have made an effort to
include links between soft matter and biomatter throughout the book.
A distinctive feature of our treatment, especially when compared to most other in-
troductory soft matter physics books, is its focus on the power of phenomenology
and the hydrodynamic approach. The book reviews the main soft matter classes and
their rheology with embedded explanations of key concepts and methods (scaling,
xxi
Landau approach, bifurcations, correlation functions, renormalization group, scat-
tering approach, etc.) without assuming detailed previous knowledge of continuum
mechanics. We do assume some background in statistical physics and some elemen-
tary knowledge of phase transitions, though. Quite a few concepts appear several
times in different chapters and examples, as this deepens the students’ understand-
ing and stimulates them to explore how the various topics are interrelated. Through
this, we hope to develop students’ intuition and give them a kind of intellectual
’agility’ in reasoning their way through complex soft matter phenomena.
Our approach is to develop many such embedded concepts ’on the fly,’ rather than in
separate appendices or boxes, mirroring how we ourselves often pick up new concepts
while doing research, or from talks. The same holds for some of the modern topics
we touch on only briefly with a short paragraph, a figure, or a note in the margin.
We realize that, as a result, such topics are typically not developed in as much depth
or as systematically as they would be were separate sections or appendixes devoted
to them. But our own students appreciate this more informal style, which is closer
to how science is actually often done in practice. Moreover, they find it stimulates
them to realize and explore connections between topics that in the beginning of their
studies were treated as separate subjects. We have also experienced that it helps
to promote their agility and to overcome their hesitance to work with a concept
they have not mastered completely. We routinely give pointers to literature where
interested students can find more information.
We support this style and approach with our layout and use of references. We develop
the main story line in the text as much as possible and without interruptions, and we
reserve notes in the margin to point out connections or to draw the student’s atten-
tion to important side issues. We view these margin notes, which often also contain
references to relevant papers or to more detailed treatments in other textbooks, as
an integral part of our approach. Numbered endnotes are used for backing up some
of the assertions in the text, or for drawing attention to subtleties or connections to
other works. These endnotes are intended for students who are eager to learn even
more; sometimes they provide answers to subtle questions which might emerge from
studying the main text. We imagine a reader skipping these endnotes when studying
a topic for the first time.
The philosophy sketched above is also reflected in the organization of the chapters.
They always start with a focus on introducing and explaining the basic concepts; we
envision a lecturer wanting to treat these sections in detail if the book is used as the
basis for a course. Toward the end, most chapters shift to descriptions of interesting
examples and applications, which students should be able to study by themselves.
There are, of course, ample opportunities for lecturers to highlight a few of these
topics and expand on them, depending on the focus of the course and the interests
of the students. But lecturers are advised to make a selection here and encourage the
students to study the other material by themselves to enhance their understanding
of the field and its breadth. We have attempted to provide sufficient references to the
literature in all these later sections, which could also be used as a basis for student
presentations.
Introducing well-established concepts which are part of a traditional field or of the
soft matter canon, and connecting them with present-day developments, has forced us
repeatedly to make tough choices about examples. We have tried to pick representative
xxii
experiments or results from topics which are likely to continue to be actively explored
in the coming years, and to include references to reviews that will give a suitable entry
to the topic to students who would like to know more. Inevitably, the interests and
knowledge of the authors introduce an element of bias in these choices.
We have split the problems which come with every chapter as much as possible
into small, concrete steps. Here, too, we have been led by our experience with un-
dergraduate students and the feedback we have received from them. As much as
possible, the problems have been designed so that if a student has difficulty with one
particular step, they should be able to move on to the next. The step-by-step format
of the problems should also make them particularly suitable for active learning and
reverse classroom settings. Similarly, instructors can easily transform these problems
into advanced lectures by integrating mathematical details into the more qualitative
introductions we provide in the main text. We have successfully adopted this ap-
proach ourselves when teaching the material in graduate classes. We hope that the
step-by-step solutions available in the instructor manual will help other instructors
achieve this goal. The more advanced problems are marked with an asterisk, the most
challenging ones with two asterisks.
Students are also encouraged to deepen their understanding of the various topics
by simulating simple processes on a computer. In order to facilitate updating and
downloading of code, and to include links to relevant other material, we have made
suggestions for coding problems available on the website www.softmatterbook.online
complementing this book.
The topics to treat if this book is used for a course will naturally depend on the
background and level of the students. The chapters in part I of the book have been
included for students like most of our own, who have not yet had an introduction
to fluid dynamics and elasticity theory, and who would like a short refresher on
fluctuations. Even though the introductory parts of these chapters could be skipped
by some students, the more advanced parts connect the classical fields with more
modern developments that may be new even to some professors. So we recommend
paying attention to these extensions. Part II contains the core material of the book;
of this we suggest studying at least chapters 4–6, and time permitting also chapter
7. Whether or not any of the advanced topics of part III are included will depend
very much on the background and interests of the students and the number of hours
available. They can be left out of an introductory course without harm. The material
in these chapters (possibly supplemented by selected readings from earlier chapters
or from introductory textbooks on dynamical systems) could form the basis of an ad-
vanced graduate course emphasizing non-equilibrium aspects of soft matter physics.
We had positive experiences teaching parts of this advanced material in summer
schools also attended by postdocs and colleagues. We end the book in part IV with a
brief perspective on new frontiers in soft matter research. Unlike the previous chap-
ters, the one in this part is much less in the style of a textbook—it primarily gives
a glimpse of emerging new directions, mostly by way of examples. These examples
and corresponding pointers to the literature provide plenty of inspiration for students
to pick end-of-course projects aimed at independently studying papers and present-
ing them in active learning sessions. The projects can complement our problems as
a more dynamic way of getting students engaged and facilitating their transition to
research.
xxiii
This book of course reflects our own understanding of soft matter, as well as our
own specific interests and style. Both have been shaped by our own teachers and
by interactions with many colleagues worldwide who shared their knowledge and
passion with us. WvS would like to take this opportunity to express his indebtedness
to two former colleagues at Bell Labs, John Weeks and the late Pierre Hohenberg.
VV would like to thank David Nelson for allowing him to see beauty in condensed
matter physics through his eyes. ZZ would like to thank Sid Nagel, Martin van Hecke,
and Michael Brenner for their long-lasting mentorship and collaboration. Hopefully
this book reflects how each of them, in his own way, set an inspiring example for our
careers, for how to approach physics, and for writing with passion and clarity.
Over the years, we have had the privilege of interacting and collaborating with many
wonderful colleagues who have shared their insights with us. Our understanding
of the topics treated in this book has benefited in particular from discussions and
collaborations with Daniel Aalberts, Alexander Abanov, Andrea Alù, Ariel Amir,
Denis Bartolo, Katia Bertoldi, José Bico, Daniel Bonn, Mark Bowick, Erez Braun,
Michael Brenner, Carolina Brito, Jasna Brujic, Christiane Caroli, Mike Cates, Paul
Chaikin, Hugues Chaté, Pat Cladis, Adam Cohen, Itai Cohen, Corentin Coulais,
Chiara Daraio, Olivier Dauchot, Benny Davidovitch, Juan De Pablo, Martin Depken,
Zvonimir Dogic, Marileen Dogterom, Ute Ebert, Wouter Ellenbroek, Nikta Fakhri,
Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, Daan Frenkel, Joost Frenken, Michel Fruchart, Margaret
Gardel, Luca Giomi, Paul Goldbart, Nigel Goldenfeld, Ray Goldstein, Ramin Golesta-
nian, Ming Han, Silke Henkes, Martin Howard, David Huse, William Irvine, Hein-
rich Jaeger, Randy Kamien, Nathan Keim, Kinneret Keren, Daniela Kraft, Ludwik
Leibler, Stan Leibler, Henk Lekkerkerker, Dov Levine, Peter Littlewood, Andrea Liu,
Detlef Lohse, Teresa Lopez-Leon, Tom Lubensky, Andy Lucas, Tony Maggs, Lakshmi-
narayanan Mahadevan, Vinny Manoharan, Cristina Marchetti, Alexander Morozov,
Arvind Murugan, Sid Nagel, David Nelson, Peter Palffy-Muhoray, Deb Panja, Ji-
woong Park, Jayson Paulose, Joey Paulsen, David Pine, Wilson Poon, Patrick Oakes,
Sriram Ramaswamy, Pedro Reis, Olivier Rivoire, Ben Rogers, Benoit Romain, Chris
Santangelo, Sri Sastri, Michael Schindler, Jim Sethna, Boris Shraiman, Jacco Snoeĳer,
Ellák Somfai, Anton Souslov, Francesco Stellacci, Kees Storm, Sebastian Streichan,
Shashi Thutupalli, Brian Tighe, John Toner, Federico Toschi, Ari Turner, Suri Vaikun-
tanathan, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Willem van de Water, Martin van Hecke, Hans
van Leeuwen, Brian Vansaders, Dave Weitz, Max Welling, Tom Witten, and Math-
ieu Wyart. We suspect virtually all of them will be able to identify particular choices,
viewpoints, or wordings which they recognize as reflecting our interactions—we owe
you a big thanks!
In addition, WvS would like to thank Luca Giomi for graciously sharing his notes
from an earlier soft matter course when WvS started teaching the course which
eventually stimulated his writing this book, and Zhihong You and Ludwig Hoffmann
who as teaching assistants developed several problems for the course; some of these
found their way to this book. Similarly, VV would like to thank Vinzenz Koning,
Richard Green, Tali Khain, Noah Mitchell, Colin, Scheibner, Jonathan Colen and Luca
Scharrer for serving as teaching assistants in the courses he taught at Leiden and
Chicago and helping in preparing problem sets, solutions, and lecture notes. We thank
Luca Scharrer and Ege Eren for preparing typeset solutions of the problems for the
instructor manual. Finally, we would like to thank Yael Avni, Chase Broedersz, Sujit
Datta, John Devany, Marjolein Dĳkstra, Daan Frenkel, Michel Fruchart, Tali Khain,
xxiv
Daniela Kraft, Henk Lekkerkerker, Detlef Lohse, David Martin, Alexandre Morin,
Alexander Morozov, Michael Schindler, Daniel Seara, Kees Storm, Sebastian Stre-
ichan, and Martin van Hecke, who provided input or feedback during the writing
process, for their help and their advice and Andrej Mesaros for his generous help,
support, and advice throughout the whole process.
We would also like to express our gratitude to the great many colleagues who were
kind enough to provide us with high-resolution images or plots from their earlier
work. Their names are given in the credit list at the end of the book.
Finally, we would like to thank several staff members of Princeton University Press
for their warm, dedicated, and eminent support: Ingrid Gnerlich for stimulating us
to write this book, and for advising and guiding us through the application, writing,
and review procedure; Whitney Rauenhorst for her help and advice on the figures;
Natalie Baan for overseeing and coordinating the production; Dimitri Karetnikov for
invaluable advice on finalizing the art; and copyeditors Bhisham Bherwani and Will
DeRooy for meticulously going through the manuscript to preserve consistency of
style and presentation, and ensure use of proper English.
You will be able to find supplementary material and coding problems for each chapter
on our book’s website www.softmatterbook.online. We will also keep a list of errata on
this website and will be grateful to readers who send us any comments on the material
and the way we present it, or suggestions for additional computer simulations. You
can contact us via this website.
Leiden, Chicago, and Paris

Wim van Saarloos, Vincenzo Vitelli, Zorana Zeravcic
September 2023
xxv
The Challenges, Relevance,
and Fun of Soft Matter Introduction
Welcome to our exploration of the challenges, relevance, and fun

of soft matter. We hope that this introduction will entice you to join
us on this fascinating journey.
The term “soft matter” refers to the subfield of condensed mat-
ter physics focused on matter which is soft in the sense that it is
easily deformed under mechanical stresses. In the simplest cases
the ensuing deformations of a large sample are elastic and re-
versible, but more often than not, structural changes in the mate-
rial take place under the applied stress and the response is non-
reversible. The material might even flow like a liquid—often it
depends on the time scale of the perturbation whether the re-
sponse is more solid-like or more liquid-like. Defined this way,
“soft matter” is a very generic term. But a key element of what
we typically gather under the name “soft matter” is that it consists
of well-defined or recognizable structural units, e.g., long chains 1932 - 2007
of molecules called polymers that themselves consist of very many
atoms, but whose interactions are weak enough that their collective
response is soft and often not captured by linearized or traditional
theories.
Typically, thermal fluctuations also play an important role on the
scale of these structural units. This means that some of the relevant
interactions on the scale of the structural building blocks, either
between them or within them, are on the order of a few kB T, the
thermal energy at room temperature. Many biomaterials are soft
materials, and thermal fluctuations typically play an important role
on the molecular and cellular scales of living matter.
Though many of the systems that we will encounter have long Figure I.1. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who in
been around, interest in them in physics is more recent. Indeed, it 1991 received the Nobel Prize in Physics
“for discovering that methods developed for
was gradually realized that soft materials pose their own problems studying order phenomena in simple sys-
and challenges. Soft materials are often characterized by the con- tems can be generalized to more complex
fluence of three elements that make their physics interesting but forms of matter, in particular to liquid crys-
also complicated. First, their response is often nonlinear due to the tals and polymers.” Picture courtesy of Marc
Fermigier.
large deformations at play. Second, they are often out of equilibrium
due to their propensity to flow easily. Third, their structure is often
amorphous or disordered, unlike the crystals typically studied in
solid state physics.
The confluence of these traits gives soft matter problems a particu- The French term for ’soft matter,’ matière
lar kind of intellectual appeal, and the field lends itself to progress molle, reportedly was proposed in 1970 by de
Gennes’s collaborator Madeleine Vieyssié.
through playfulness, minimalist tabletop experiments, as well as
virtuoso chemical synthesis and state-of-the-art experimentation,
and intellectual agility (besides formal mathematical theories). It is
1
(a) Pulling on DNA (b) Aggregate
(c) Nonlinear rheology
Shear force
Shear rate
(d) Clay, cornstarch

(l) Active nematic
attractive interactions
att
ty
ach
nsi
de
to
ad
se
DN
dm pe
sha
rea
ole
A
cu r
lar inc g ula (e) Use in industry
mo
tor irre
s
(k) Granular media
blow up size engineer particle
ns 1 μm
tio dro
ac
inter ple
ts
pe
e
tun (f) Microemulsion
sha
inc
(j) Directed
rea
ith
self-assembly
bidisperse
se
gw
de
yin
nsi
pla
ty
(i) Explore new phases (g) Explore

(h) Glass dynamics condensed matter
Relaxation time
Volume fraction
Figure I.2. Illustration of how we can modify a single colloidal particle of about a micrometer in size in different ways to create a
plethora of soft matter systems. Some examples are relevant to applications, others play a role in bioscience or daily life, and yet others
are nice model systems that allow us to pursue fundamental questions. All the examples are discussed in more detail in section I.1.
The Challenges, Relevance, and Fun of Soft Matter 3
also a great playground for illustrating general concepts and con-

nections between seemingly disconnected fields of science. Grad-
ually, since the 1970s, accelerated by the awarding of the Nobel
Prize in Physics to de Gennes in the 1990s (see figure I.1), soft
matter gained recognition as a field in its own right, with its own
richness and attraction. Ever since, the field has gained enormous
traction, also due to its relevance to industry, its connections with
bioscience and complex systems, new optical imaging techniques,
and the rapidly increasing computer power for imaging, data anal-
ysis, and simulation.
Figure I.3. Perrin’s original drawing showing
the displacement of three emulsion droplets.
Perrin marked positions of each droplet at
regular time intervals, and then joined the
I.1 Inspiration from an example dots to illustrate the trajectories.1 Brownian
motion is discussed in chapter 3.
What makes soft matter special and inspiring to us is illustrated

in figure I.2. Here, we start with a very simple building block at
the center of the figure and let it explode into a diverse range of
complex systems. We choose as our basic building block a so-called 10
colloidal particle, a solid spherical particle with a diameter of about
Force [pN]
1µm (one micrometer), say, dissolved in a fluid such as water. Such
a particle is small enough to undergo Brownian motion visible
through a microscope, due to the random kicks it experiences from added ions
the solvent molecules. This behavior was observed in experiments no added ions
0.1
by Jean Perrin over 100 years ago when he tested Einstein’s theory
of Brownian motion; see figure I.3. 3
Extension [μm]
You probably won’t consider a single Brownian particle in a fluid
as soft matter per se. But it is one of its important building blocks.
As figure I.2 illustrates, when we take this colloidal particle as a
starting point and explore all kinds of extensions and modifica-
0
tions, we inevitably land in the realm of soft matter. We would like 0 300
to start our journey with a kaleidoscope of examples that illustrate time [s]
this point. Do not be disheartened if some of the systems or terms Figure I.4. Schematic rendering of experi-
are new to you. Most of them will return in more detail later in ments by Besteman et al., 2007 on pulling
double-stranded DNA with a colloidal par-
the book. ticle in an optical trap, starting from a com-
pletely stretched configuration. Depending
a. Using a colloid to pull on DNA on the solution in which the experiment is
done, two types of behavior are observed as
A small micron-sized colloidal particle can nowadays easily be the pulling force is lowered. With ions added
manipulated in so-called optical traps. If you attach the particle to to the solution (solid line), the repulsive elec-
DNA, you can use the trapped colloid to pull on the DNA and thus trostatic forces between DNA segments are
screened and the DNA coils up tightly when
measure its elastic properties, by plotting curves of the force against the force decreases. When the forces are not
the extension. Figure I.4 illustrates simple examples of pulling on screened (dashed lines) the DNA does not
DNA. The pulling force, sketched with red lines in the upper panel, coil up and one measures the force-extension
curve resulting from the DNA behaving like
is decreased in time, and the resulting change of the extension of
a random coil. The width of the shaded area
the DNA with time is depicted with blue lines in the lower panel. indicates the size of fluctuations.2 Such types
of experiments are discussed in section 3.6.1
The figure illustrates experiments under two different conditions. and section 5.4.4.
The dashed lines indicate behavior in a solution with no salt added.
4 Introduction
As the lower panel shows, when the pulling force becomes low,
the polymer behaves like a random coil (as sketched in the bottom
panel): fluctuations in the extension (indicated by the shaded area)
are large. The solid lines illustrate what happens when ions are
added to the solution. Electric charges on the DNA that keep it
straighter become less important as they are ‘screened’ by the ions,
so the DNA reduces its extension by coiling up. We shall discuss
in this book how thermal fluctuations make the DNA behave as
an elastic spring, and how ions can screen electric forces, and thus
affect biopolymers like DNA. Note that these forces are really tiny,
on the order of piconewtons (pN). Other experiments of this type
allow one to probe the effects of twisting and curling the DNA, or
even to explore how the DNA sequence is reflected in the force
variations needed to rip the two DNA strands apart.3 Such studies
are not limited to DNA; one can nowadays also attach particles to
molecular motors and even observe fluctuations in their steps. This
Figure I.5. Fractal aggregate grown in a petri takes us into the realm of biomatter.
dish. For so-called diffusion-limited aggre-
gation in two dimensions, the fractals exhibit
a fractal dimension df ≈ 1.71.4 We treat frac- b. Formation of fractal aggregates due to attractive interactions
tal structures in section 4.5.1, and we treat the When we have a dilute solution of colloidal particles with attractive
light-scattering technique used to probe the
fractal dimension in section 3.7. interactions, the particles aggregate slowly and form very open,
floppy structures; see figure I.5. These structures are fractals, ob-
jects whose dimensionality is not an integer. This so-called fractal
dimension depends on the processes that affect how fast the struc-
tures form. It could be either the diffusion rate of the particles or
shear thickening
the reaction rate with which the particles stick to one another. The
Apparent viscosity
fractal dimension of such aggregates is typically determined exper-

imentally by scattering light. We’ll see that dilute polymers (i.e.,
long chains of molecules) in solutions also form very open struc-
shear thinning tures with a fractal dimension. This dimension can be measured
with neutrons rather than light (section 5.5.1.a).
Shear rate
c. Shear thinning and shear thickening of dense suspensions
Figure I.6. Illustration of shear thinning be- Imagine you start with a dilute suspension, i.e., a heterogeneous
havior for small concentrations due to layer- mixture, of noninteracting colloidal particles in water, and you
ing of particles and shear thickening at larger
concentrations due to clustering of colloidal start increasing their concentration. For low concentrations, the
particles. The issue will be discussed in sec- suspension flows like water, albeit with a somewhat enhanced
tion 4.6.5 resistance to motion called viscosity. We say that the suspension
behaves like a Newtonian fluid, a fluid whose flow is characterized
by a viscosity. However, by the time the volume fraction occupied
An everyday example of a shear-thinning by the particles has become as large as about 30%, an interesting
fluid is blood, due to the presence of the effect occurs, as illustrated in figure I.6. The suspension shows
red blood cells (which of course are not per-
fect spheres, and which deform under strong shear thinning, meaning that the effective viscosity decreases with
shear). increased shear rate. The shear rate denotes the rate of change of
the velocity at which a fluid layer flows with respect to an adjacent
layer. As depicted in the figure, the origin of shear thinning is the
layering of particles. A fluid with a shear-dependent viscosity is
denoted as ’non-Newtonian’ or complex. When the concentration of
particles is increased even more, to around 60%, the opposite effect

typically occurs: the effective viscosity now increases with shear
rate, because obstructing structures form during flow. Almost all
soft matter systems behave as non-Newtonian or complex fluids when The main features and consequences of the
flowing. Rheology is the time-honored field that studies how these complex fluid rheology of polymers are dis-
cussed in section 5.10.
materials deform and flow.
d. Particles with irregular shapes: Even more complex rheology

When we change the particles’ shape from a nice round sphere,
we move quite close to what everyday materials like clay and
cornstarch look like microscopically; see figure I.7. Indeed, these 20 μm 10 μm
strongly exhibit complex fluid behavior (sometimes also due to
charges on the particles)—just watching one of the many YouTube
videos of people walking on cornstarch should be sufficient to con-
vince you of its amazing and surprising rheology: on short time
scales it resists deformations and holds your weight like an elastic
solid, but on longer scales it flows like a viscous liquid.
Figure I.7. Upper row: cornstarch (left) and
e. Applications like sunscreen cream and paint clay (right) consist of very irregular particles.
Below: two images illustrating that one can
Let’s move for a moment into a more application-oriented direc- walk on cornstarch.6 This is a vivid example
tion: sunscreen creams are essentially dense suspensions of par- of the remarkable properties that complex
ticles engineered to block UV light, while when you zoom in on fluids can exhibit.
paint, as figure I.8 illustrates, you discover that it consists of many
irregular particles. These particles spontaneously organize them-
selves into layered structures and are made to crosslink, i.e., stick
to each other, when the solvent evaporates upon drying. A lot of
science (chemistry!) and empirical know-how goes into optimizing
the surface properties of paint particles.
f. Droplets rather than solid particles: Microemulsions

Let us imagine we change the constituent particles from solid to
liquid: we obtain what is technically known as a microemulsion
of droplets of one phase, say oil, in another, say water. Milk, may-
onnaise, and yoghurt are typical everyday emulsions. In milk the 5 μm 20 μm
paint mayo
suspension is not so dense, so milk behaves for most purposes as
a regular Newtonian fluid like water. But mayonnaise is a dense
suspension of oil droplets of various sizes; see figure I.8. As you Figure I.8. On the scale of microns, paint
know from daily life, mayonnaise is a complex fluid with abnormal (left) consists of particles which organize into
layered structures that crosslink when the
flow properties. It is said to have a yield stress, which means in solvent evaporates. Mayonnaise (right) is a
simple terms that it stays put on a spoon. The yoghurt you eat in stable emulsion of oil droplets. Mayonnaise
the morning also has interesting rheological properties: it ages! If only starts to flow under a sufficiently large
you leave it undisturbed it gradually shows solid-like behavior, but force, so it is an example of soft matter with
a yield stress.7 Droplets are discussed in sec-
if you stir it for a moment it flows again quite easily. Microemul- tion 1.15, yield stress and rheology of emul-
sions play a role in many industries, as the large surface-to-volume sions and colloidal suspensions in section
ratio speeds up many processes like, e.g., extraction of dissolved 4.6. Emulsion image courtesy of Angus Mc-
molecules from solution. The tragic Covid-19 crisis brought many Mullen and Jasna Brujic.
soft matter phenomena to the fore, such as the breakup and evap-
oration of virus-bearing mucus droplets during coughing.
6 Introduction
g. A model system with which to probe the dynamics of

disordered solids
Let us return to our spherical solid particles in suspension, in the
absence of external forces or imposed shear deformations. The par-
ticles still explore phase space due to thermal fluctuations. So if we
change their density we can explore how they form crystals or
Figure I.9. With modern imaging techni- disordered solids, and how these respond to forces. We can in ad-
ques, one can follow the precise location of dition play with particle shapes and interactions. Thanks to recent
all the colloidal particles. In this case, local advances in optical imaging and digital analysis, we have powerful
response to an applied strain of particles in a
disordered dense packing is indicated with a
experimental model systems with which to study basic questions of
color code, as detailed in figure 4.14.c. Image condensed matter, from crystalline to disordered phases and their
courtesy of Peter Schall.8 Section 4.5.4 puts formation. Indeed, experimentalists can nowadays follow all indivi-
such experiments in context. dual particles, which play the role of the constituent atoms of solid
state systems. Figure I.9 shows an example from such a study.
h. A model system with which to study the glass transition

One of the salient features of glasses is that, as the temperature
is lowered, the viscosity rises rapidly by many orders of magni-
Simulation time steps
108
tude: motion slows down to the point that it becomes essentially
jamming range
unnoticeable on human time scales. This reflects the fact that the
106 constituent particles increasingly get arrested. Whether there is
an underlying phase transition—and, if so, what its nature is—
remains a matter of debate and ongoing research.
104
Soft matter models and ideas have recently thrown new light on
0.56 0.60 0.64 these issues. Indeed, a collection of hard colloidal particles which
Volume fraction is sufficiently polydisperse (i.e., the particles have different sizes)
Figure I.10. Rendering of the relaxation time will not easily crystallize. As a result, when the volume fraction
(measured in terms of the number of Monte of the particles increases, one can follow how the system gets ‘ar-
Carlo steps) in simulations of a system of
polydisperse spheres. Redrawn from "Equi-
rested,’ i.e., how particles get stuck. Figure I.10 shows an example
librium Sampling of Hard Spheres up to the from a computer simulation of such a system. The relaxation time
Jamming Density and Beyond" by Berthier et (i.e., the typical length of time the system takes to relax back into
al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 238002).9 In section an unperturbed state after a disturbance) is plotted as a function of
4.5.4 we discuss why colloids are studied in
the context of the glass transition.
particle volume fraction: it rises by more than five orders of mag-
nitude as the critical packing fraction at which the system jams is
approached.
i. Playing with the shape of the hard core particles

If we think again about particles which experience Brownian fluc-
tuations but have no interaction except for their hard core repul-
sion (meaning that the particles have infinite interaction when they
overlap), we can consider changing their shapes, and explore what
types of phases they form. It has become clear in recent years that
a plethora of phases can be formed from hard polyhedra. A few
simple phases found in simulations are shown in figure I.11.
In finite temperature (T ) simulations with hard core interactions,
the ordered phases minimize the free energy F = U − T S by max-
imizing the entropy S . The thermodynamically stable phase is the
PLASTIC CRYSTALS CRYSTALS LIQUID C RYSTALS

FCC -brass BCT Diamond Smectic Nematic
Sphere Packing (Voronoi Cells) Crystal Lattice (Bonds) Parallel Alignment (Director)
Figure I.11. If one experiments with their form, polyhedra with hard core interactions can form all kinds of complicated phases. Image
from Damasceno et al., 2012.10 The question of the formation of nontrivial phases of particles with hard core repulsion will return in
section 4.2.1 when we discuss colloids and in section 6.1.1 in the context of our discussion of liquid crystals.
one where the particles have the most room to wiggle around, thus
maximizing their entropy, while the internal energy U remains
zero as nonoverlapping hard core particles don’t interact.
j. Tuning the interactions: Toward programmable matter

Instead of changing particle shape, let us go back to micron-sized
monodisperse spherical particles, but tune the interactions be-
tween them, i.e., make the particles distinguishable. In practice
this can be done by coating the surface of the particles with (dif-
ferent) short single strands of DNA. For example, a particle of type
A can strongly attract B, moderately attract C, not attract D, etc.
Doing this for all the pairs allows us to define an interaction matrix
that specifies how all the different particle types interact.
Figure I.12 shows an example of how one can tune the interactions
of dozens of particles so as to make specific desired structures
favored. As we will discuss in chapter 10, some basic questions
concerning artificial life can be studied with such types of ’pro-
grammable matter.’ Figure I.12. Playing with the interactions be-
tween all pairs of particles allows one to
explore how certain structures are favored
k. Blowing up the size: From colloids to and formed by thermal fluctuations. The top
granular matter structure is a 19-particle chiral chain, the
middle one a 19-particle square bipyramid,
Imagine we increase the size of our micron-sized particle a and the bottom one a 69-particle tower. Cor-
thousand-fold and consider a large enough volume fraction so responding interaction matrices are shown
that many spheres inevitably touch—we have thus constructed a to the right of each structure (the one for
the tower structure is only partially shown).
nice model system for granular media. In a more realistic granular
Each blue element in the symmetric matrix
medium, such as a heap of salt or the flowing grains shown in Mij indicates the presence of an attractive
figure I.13, the particle shapes are irregular and frictional forces interaction between particles i and j .11 The
play an important role too. It has been realized in recent years that topic is treated in chapter 10.
these athermal granular media—the particles are so heavy that
8 Introduction
thermal fluctuations don’t matter—display striking similarities to

thermal systems of Brownian spheres which are worth exploring
(see section 2.10).
Interestingly, granular media research has yielded key insights for
glass research, and vice versa. Theory and experiments on dense
packing of shaken disks have convincingly demonstrated the im-
portance of capturing density inhomogeneities in glasses using
higher order correlation functions (e.g., the density is evaluated at
three points in space), rather than the pair correlation functions
traditionally employed in statistical physics.12
Figure I.13. A granular medium consisting of l. Self-propelled particles and active matter
irregular millimeter size grains. The photo We end this list of examples by mentioning one more research di-
was taken with a relatively long exposure
time, so that the grains flowing near the in- rection: the field of active matter, the subject of chapter 9, in which
clined surface are blurred. Clearly, the flow is one studies collections of entities which can move by themselves.
localized to the top layer of a few grains. Im- Swimming bacteria are a good example. It has long been known
age courtesy of Sid Nagel.13 Granular media that sufficiently dense suspensions of bacteria naturally show col-
are discussed in section 2.10.
lective swarming effects. This is essentially due to the tendency to
align their swimming direction via hydrodynamic interactions.14
More recently, particle-based systems composed of self-propelled
colloids have been developed that mimic the swarming behavior
Microtubules of fishes and birds, which also tend to align the direction in which
+ they swim or fly to that of their neighbors.
Kinesin
motors In microbiology, we encounter another interesting but less intelli-
gent type of active matter, molecular motors, which play an impor-
+ tant role for transport in cells. An interesting twist in active matter
research is that of mixing microtubules (pretty stiff long biofila-
ments) with molecular motors and ATP (adenosine triphosphate)
molecules, which the motors need as fuel. Figure I.14 shows a
snapshot from the continuously swirling type of flow patterns one
observes in this system. As the long microtubules tend to line up,
they exhibit so-called nematic liquid crystalline order. However,
the patterns are very much dominated by defects in the alignment
of the filaments that are specific to nematics. In short, we have
active matter with defect-driven liquid-crystal-like patterns!
100 μm
Figure I.14. A still from a continuously I.2 Our view of soft matter
changing pattern obtained by microtubules
and molecular motors sketched in the top. and our approach
White lines are superimposed on the image
to highlight the nematic order while defects
in the nematic order are marked with white We could do an exercise very similar to what we did in figure
dots. Figure courtesy of Sattvic Ray and
I.2, starting from long molecular chains, the characteristic building
Zvonimir Dogic.15 Active nematics are the
subject of section 9.5. blocks of polymers or liquid crystals, but we hope that this kalei-
doscope of examples, reflected in the way we approach the field in
this book, already gives you a glimpse of the appeal of soft mat-
ter.Some subdisciplines in physics have a clear and well-defined
theoretical framework that forms the canon of the discipline. Soft Soft matter is a field which resonates at every
matter, on the other hand, cannot be captured in terms of a sin- level with the basic theme of Phil Anderson’s
famous “More Is Different” article (Ander-
gle framework or a few basic concepts. As a result, it pays to son, 1972). It is a strong plea to acknowledge
approach problems from various perspectives and to take ad- that each level of natural phenomena poses
vantage of similarities that transcend traditional boundaries of its own set of challenges that require new
(sub)disciplines, the more so since different concepts are relevant concepts to be introduced for understanding
them.
on different scales.
In short, we intend to portray soft matter as we perceive it: a diverse
and somewhat iconoclastic field that attracts people with differ-
ent backgrounds and training, and we invite you to join us in
this tour.
I.2.1 Our approach in this book
The aim of this book is to serve as a textbook on the basic phenom-

ena and concepts of soft matter for advanced undergraduate and
beginning graduate students: we aim to present an introductory
overview of the various soft matter phases and some of the key
conceptual frameworks used to analyze them. The book should
be a stepping stone for further specialization, while students who
specialize in other subdisciplines will acquire a good overview of
the field, and get familiar with concepts and a way of thinking
that has broad applications. We also intend to give students whose
main research focus is in biomatter or biophysics the necessary
background to understand the application of soft matter concepts
in life sciences. Therefore, throughout the book, examples of soft
matter applications or concepts in biomatter are emphasized when-
ever possible. The book also pays attention to applications of the
topics treated in science and technology.
The examples and discussion of the previous section illustrate the
challenge of writing such an introductory book. How do we, with-
out becoming encyclopedic, do justice to a field which branches
out in many directions, and which thrives on cross-fertilization
and interactions with other subdisciplines and applications? Our
choice has been to focus on the main concepts and phenomena
from a physics perspective (our own background), and to try to
select applications which are interesting and instructive, in that
they enhance one’s understanding of important concepts.
In view of our conviction that it pays off not to draw sharp bound-
aries with other fields, we deliberately try to be open-minded in
our choice of topics too: some examples and applications that you
might justifiably not consider soft matter per se have been included
because they are sufficiently illustrative and interesting for a soft
matter scientist to become familiar with. Nonetheless, a number of
important subjects have only been touched upon.
10 Introduction
The syntheses of polymers, liquid crys- For example, macromolecular chemistry is a subdiscipline of chem-
tals, and colloids are separate and well- istry that lies at the basis of making the building blocks of soft
developed subdisciplines, so there are many
introductory books for them, each with its matter; it is a large and important field in itself that we do not
own focus and approach. For a starting point, cover in detail by choice. Likewise, surface chemistry is impor-
we mention three popular books which have tant for manipulating the surface of colloids so as to tune them
been revised and extended over the years: to the desired properties or to optimize industrial processes in
Carraher Jr., 2017 for polymers, Collings and
Goodby, 2019 for liquid crystals, and Shaw, using colloids or more generally dispersed media. As a result of
2013 for colloid and interface chemistry. our physics-oriented approach, we take the building blocks of soft
matter and their properties mostly as given, while we refer you to
other sources for detailed explanations on how to make them.
I.2.2 The hydrodynamic perspective
We started this chapter with a bottom-up approach aimed at il-

lustrating how complex soft matter phases and phenomena arise
starting from microscopic building blocks as familiar as colloidal
particles or droplets; see figure I.2. We now provide a glimpse into
a complementary, top-down approach that is often employed to
systematically model soft matter systems. As before, we will start
with a pictorial representation of the key ideas as illustrated in
figure I.15.
The top row lists three examples of (soft) condensed matter phases:
a crystal in which point particles are regularly arranged on a
square lattice, a so-called nematic liquid crystal in which elon-
gated molecules are aligned along a common axis, and finally a
flock of birds all moving along the same direction. Despite their
obvious differences, these three systems (and many more!) can be
analyzed and modeled through a unified approach built around
common concepts listed in the gray column of figure I.15. The sec-
ond row shows that the three phases can be classified according to
what symmetries they possess and, more crucially, what symme-
tries they break. The third row introduces a quantity called order
parameter, which measures how ordered each of the three sys-
tems is. The last two rows reveal how each of the three systems
can be perturbed by smooth periodic modulations of the ordered
phase called hydrodynamic modes (fourth row), of which long-
wavelength sound modes are a familiar example, and by even more
drastic distortions called topological defects (fifth row).
As we said before, do not get discouraged if aspects of figure I.15
and the accompanying discussion seem abstract or if the associ-
ated terminology comes across as technical. Plenty of examples
will follow naturally in the remainder of this book. For now, we
refer to figure I.15 as the hydrodynamic perspective and sketch its
main features. Here the word hydrodynamics is used to indicate a
phenomenological approach that goes beyond the study of water,
coffee, or any other fluid.
Crystal Nematic Flock
liquid crystal
Phases
Translation Rotation Rotation
Broken
symmetries
Displacement Director Polarization
Order
parameters
Sound waves Orientational Polarization

waves waves
Hydrodynamic
modes
Dislocation Disclination Aster
Topological
defects
Figure I.15. Soft matter phases classified according to their broken symmetries, order parameters, hydrodynamic modes, and topolog-
ical defects represented as rows. The first column represents crystalline phases, the second column nematic liquid crystals (see chapter
6), and the third column flocking (chapter 9). The orientational order parameter of the nematic phase, the director n̂, is drawn as a
double-headed vector to express that the orientations n̂ and −n̂ are equivalent (see section 6.1.4 for further discussion).
12 Introduction
The hydrodynamic approach is a prescription to construct ’coarse-

A coarse-grained equation is a mathemat- grained’ equations governing the macroscopic behavior of any
ical description of a many-body system in physical system, starting from symmetries and conservation laws,
which some of its fine details, e.g., individual
particle coordinates or velocities, have been without assuming or even needing detailed knowledge of its mi-
smoothed over in favor of continuous fields. croscopic building blocks. It is pretty much the opposite approach
to how we constructed figure I.2.
a. Spontaneously broken symmetries and associated

order parameters
In the next chapter, we will show in detail how to derive the so-
In the example considered here of a fluid called Navier-Stokes equations that describe the evolution of the
freezing into a solid, translational symmetry velocity fields of a fluid like water using only conservation of mass,
is said to be spontaneously broken because
the microscopic physical laws remain sym- momentum, and energy. When viewed from the perspectives of
metrical throughout the process, even if the symmetries, a fluid is a very simple state: it is invariant with respect
crystal phase manifestly breaks translational to arbitrary rotations and translations. However, this is not the case
symmetry. for other soft matter phases. For example, a crystal is invariant only
under translations by a lattice spacing; see the first column of figure
I.15. Hence, during a phase transition from a liquid to a crystal,
the symmetry is lowered—the crystal is said to be a spontaneously
broken-symmetry phase.
Our discussion in this section of broken sym- In order to quantify the amount of order in a spontaneously broken-
metries and the associated order parameters symmetry phase, we need to define an additional field called an
is very much inspired by that of Anderson,
1997. order parameter. For a crystal, the order parameter is the displace-
ment that measures the deviation of the atoms from a perfect lattice;
see the first column in figure I.15. Note that what really matters here
are gradients in displacement because the crystal is invariant un-
der constant particle translations. In order for the atoms to remain
in their periodic arrangements and resist mechanical stresses or
thermal fluctuations, the crystal must be endowed with a rigidity
(i.e., the ability to resist deformations) whose strength is controlled
by an elastic modulus. This is a generic feature of all phases with
a spontaneously broken symmetry, not only the crystal, as shown
in the last two columns of figure I.15, where a similar analysis is
illustrated for the nematic and flocking phases.
b. Hydrodynamic modes and topological defects

Long-wavelength (also known as hydrodynamic) sound modes (or
waves) are periodic modulations of the particle displacements (or,
more generally, the order parameter) that nearly approach a uni-
form translation. Since their appearance restores the broken trans-
lational symmetry of the fluid, they cost only a nearly vanishing
elastic energy. When the wavelength of the sound modes goes to
infinity, the interparticle distance is left nearly constant.
More drastic distortions of the crystal, called dislocations, are cre-
ated by removing a whole row of atoms. They have an energy
cost that diverges as the size of the system is taken to infinity.
These imperfections are examples of a broad class of objects called
topological defects. The name topological stems from the fact that
the presence of an isolated topological defect will not go unno-
ticed even far away from it, because any path (no matter its shape)
encircling its center will reveal the existence of a missing row of
atoms: there is a missing step equal to an integer multiple of the
lattice spacing. Like hydrodynamic modes, topological defects are
a ubiquitous feature of broken-symmetry phases, and they can be
classified (using the mathematical language of group theory) ac-
cording to the symmetry of the relevant order parameter; see the
last two columns of figure I.15 for illustrations of the corresponding
entries for nematic and flocking phases.
c. Classifying (soft) condensed matter phases

by their broken symmetries
In the second column of figure I.15, we consider phases with bro-
ken rotational symmetry called nematic liquid crystals, familiar
for their use in computer displays. As we will discuss in chapter
6, in a nematic phase, interactions between elongated molecules
favor their alignment along a common orientation that singles out
a specific direction in space, hence breaking rotational symmetry.
But, unlike in a crystal, the molecules are not constrained to lie on
a lattice: there is no translational order, only orientational order.
Here, the order parameter, called a director, is a double-headed
vector field (i.e., a line field) that measures the local deviations
of the orientation of the molecules from their average direction.
This director is the order parameter whose time evolution and ori-
entational elasticity, i.e., the tendency of the molecules to resist
gradients in their orientation of alignment, are crucial to under-
standing the physics of nematic liquid crystals. Also in this case,
the broken orientational order can be restored by long-wavelength
orientational waves. Similarly, topological defects called disclina-
tions exist (last panel of the second column of figure I.15), and they
can be classified according to the angle by which the director ro-
tates around the defects’ center; see chapter 6 for more details. This
angle must be an integer multiple of π because the order parameter
is a double-headed vector invariant under a rotation by π .
As a last example of this approach, consider the flocking phase that The flocking behavior of active media is dis-
describes the alignment of self-propelled agents such as birds or cussed in section 9.2.
fishes. In this case, in addition to a spontaneously broken rotational
symmetry, Galilean invariance is also explicitly broken. What that Rotational symmetry is spontaneously bro-
means is that there is a preferred frame (set by the air or water) with ken during the transition from a disordered
phase (where the birds interact so weakly
respect to which the self-propelled agents like birds and fish move. compared to noise that they fly in random
In this case, the order parameter is a vector, called polarization, directions) to the flocking phase (birds spon-
tracking the average velocity field of the self-propelled particles; taneously pick a direction of alignment).
see the third column of figure I.15. Hence both the hydrodynamic Galilean invariance, on the other hand, is
explicitly broken because each bird self-
modes and the topological defects take new forms compared to propels.
nematics, but the strategy used to model them is the same as in the
previous examples.
14 Introduction
In the remainder of this book, we introduce the main classes of soft

matter phases from this perspective, embedding explanations of
key concepts and methods (scaling, correlation functions, Landau
approach, renormalization group, scattering, etc.) without assum-
ing previous knowledge of hydrodynamic theories or advanced
statistical mechanics. We have made an effort to have concepts ap-
pear several times in different chapters and examples, as this will
help deepen your understanding of soft matter and help you see
how the various topics are interrelated.
I.2.3 A field relevant to society
Beyond its appeal from a basic science perspective, soft matter is

a field extremely relevant to society with many real-world appli-
cations. Here, again, a range of scales plays a role. While in some
cases (think of the process industry) its relevance stems from the
ability to manipulate soft matter at the mesoscopic scales, in other
Think of accidentally spilling coffee, causing cases its societal relevance stems directly from the macroscopic
a stain. The tendency of particles to move scale at which the properties of soft materials manifest themselves.
to the rim of the spill, where most of the
evaporation takes place, causing the familiar Even if it can be traced down to molecular structure, the way soft
look of coffee stains, is explained in section materials deform or flow is often very tangible in daily life.
1.13.2. This phenomenon has direct relevance
to the ink-jet printing industry. As developments of new concepts and applications often go hand
in hand, we have made the deliberate choice to integrate appli-
cations in the text where appropriate, rather than to list these at
the end as an afterthought. In order to give some idea of the rel-
For an intellectually stimulating and tasty in- evance and range of applications, let us list some examples. As
troduction to soft matter science and cook- most food is soft matter, the food industry relies on processing and
ing, we recommend the book and culinary
creations of M. P. Brenner et al., 2020. controlling the different phases, stabilizing mixtures, minimizing
degradation, and optimizing uptake.16 Something similar holds
for the process, cosmetics, painting and printing industries.17 Poly-
mer chemistry and physics are behind most consumer products
Soft matter research has helped launch ma- made of plastic. The plastics industry is now in particular explor-
jor industries—think of liquid crystals, poly- ing new lightweight materials for insulation and the aerospace
mers and glasses—but you will also see that
soft matter inventions play an increasingly industry, biodegradable plastics, and soft electronics.18 The phar-
important role in startups and consumer maceutical industry explores controlling amphiphile phases for
products, such as ones based on mechanical optimizing drug delivery.19 Covid-19 posed many soft matter ques-
metamaterials. tions, including virus spreading through aerosols.20 Controlling
droplet properties can help us minimize unwanted spreading of
pesticides.21 Glass with switchable properties and LCDs rely on
the ability to switch liquid crystals with small electric fields.22
Self-organized patterns create new material properties.23 Soft mat-
ter robots, cloaking and auxetic metamaterials, origami, and pro-
grammable and designer matter provide new opportunities whose
range of applications is only slowly becoming clear.24
I.3 Outline of the book and how to use it
Since coarse-graining and the hydrodynamic approaches are so

much part of our description, and since flow, elasticity, and fluc-
tuations are integral elements of the behavior of soft matter, we
start our presentation by giving a brief introduction to the essen-
tials from these topics in part I of this book. Even though we start
each chapter with basic classical results, we deliberately end every
chapter with some examples of modern directions. So even if you
are familiar with the classical fields, or if these are not treated when
this book is used for a course, we hope you will glance at those
sections of the chapters in part I that convey present research direc-
tions, because they connect with the topics treated in later sections.
Part II forms the heart of the book, and here we zoom in on the
most salient examples of soft matter: colloids, polymers, surfaces,
interfaces and membranes, and liquid crystals. In part III the focus While our understanding of the formation of
is on two advanced topics: pattern formation and active matter. patterns in non-equilibrium systems was de-
veloped mostly in the last decades of the pre-
The latter chapter extends the material treated in part II to active vious century, there are few textbook-style
matter. We end the book in part IV with a brief perspective on new introductions to this topic. Since it plays a
frontiers in soft matter research. Unlike the previous chapters, the role in a large variety of soft matter, active
last one is much less in the style of a textbook—it merely gives a matter and biomatter problems, we have in-
cluded it in this book.
glimpse of emerging directions and opportunities.
A number of problems are included at the end of each chapter 1–9;
we have split each problem into several small steps. This should
make it possible to move on to the next step should you get stuck at
a particular point. In many cases, the problems provide mathemat-
ical details that support the qualitative treatment of the material
presented in the main text or offer real-world examples of soft
matter research questions.
There are quite a few interesting videos on the web that illustrate or
expound many of the topics discussed in this book. Because their
URLs may change, we have not included these in the main text.
Instead, we invite you to consult the website complementing this
book: www.softmatterbook.online; it will be kept up-to-date. Com-
puter simulations that are fun and instructive are also available via
the website.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CHAPTER XII
THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS
Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first
establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth
century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of
a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had
conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the
magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his
too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove
that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality.
Peucestas, the Royal bodyguard who received the satrapy of Persia
itself on his master’s death, and was confirmed in it at the first
shuffling of the cards at Triparadisus, found it expedient to adopt the
Persian language and dress, with the result that his subjects
conceived for him an affection only equal to that which they
afterwards showed for Seleucus[768]. Later, when the rise of the
Parthian power under Arsaces brought about the defeat of Seleucus
II Callinicus, the opposition to European forms of government found
a centre further north[769], whence armies of lightly-equipped
horsemen were able to raid up to the Eastern shores of the
Mediterranean[770]. Thanks probably to the knowledge of this support
in reserve, when Western Asia found the military power of the Greek
kings becoming exhausted by internecine wars, she began to throw
off the alien civilization that she had in part acquired, and to return
more and more to Persian ways[771]. When the Romans in their turn
set to work to eat up the enfeebled Greek kingdoms, they quickly
found themselves in presence of a revived nationality as firmly held
and nearly as aggressive as their own, and henceforth Roman and
Parthian were seldom at peace. The long struggle with Mithridates,
who gave himself out as a descendant of Darius[772], taught the
Romans how strong was the reaction towards Persian nationality
even in Asia Minor, and the overthrow of Crassus by the Parthians
convinced his countrymen for a time of the folly of pushing their arms
too far eastwards.
With the establishment of the Empire, the antagonism between
Rome and Persia became still more strongly marked, and a struggle
commenced which lasted with little intermission until the foundation
of the Mahommedan Caliphate. In this struggle the advantage was
not always, as we should like to think, on the side of the Europeans.
While Augustus reigns, Horace boasts, there is no occasion to dread
the “dreadful Parthians[773]”; but Corbulo is perpetually fighting them,
and when Nero commits suicide, the legend immediately springs up
that the tyrant is not dead, but has only betaken himself beyond the
Euphrates to return with an army of Rome’s most dreaded enemies
to lay waste his rebellious country[774]. Towards the close of the first
Christian century, Trajan, fired, according to Gibbon, by the example
of Alexander, led an army into the East and achieved successes
which enabled him to add to his titles that of Parthicus[775]; but the
whole of his Oriental conquests were given back by the prudent
Hadrian on his succession to the throne. During the reign of Marcus
Aurelius, Avidius Cassius obtained some solid victories on the
frontier; but Macrinus is said to have bought off the Parthians with a
bribe of nearly two millions of money. The rise of the Sassanian
house and the retransfer of the leadership from the Parthians to their
kinsmen in Persia proper brought about the reform of the Persian
religion, and added another impulse to the increasing strength of
Persian national feeling. Alexander Severus may have gained some
successes in the field over Ardeshîr or Artaxerxes, the restorer of the
Persian monarchy[776]; but in the reign of the last named king’s son
and successor Sapor, the capture of the Emperor Valerian with his
whole army, and the subsequent ravaging of the Roman provinces in
Asia by the victors, showed the Republic how terrible was the might
of the restored kingdom[777]. Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, did
much to restore the prestige of Roman arms in the East; and
although he was assassinated when on the march against Persia,
the Emperor Carus shortly after led a successful expedition into the
heart of the Persian kingdom[778]. In the reign of Diocletian, indeed,
the Persians lost five provinces to the Romans[779]; but under
Constantine the Great the Romans were again vanquished in the
field, and the Persians were only prevented by the heroic resistance
of the fortified town of Nisibis and an incursion into their Eastern
provinces of tribes from Central Asia from again overrunning the
Asiatic possessions of Rome[780].
Henceforward, the history of the long contest between the two great
empires—“the eyes,” as the Persian ambassador told Galerius, “of
the civilized world[781],” is the record of almost uninterrupted advance
on the part of Persia and of continual retreat on the side of Rome.
The patriotic enthusiasm of a Julian, and the military genius of a
Belisarius, aided by the dynastic revolutions common among
Oriental nations, might for a time arrest the progress of the
conquering Persians; but, bit by bit, the Asiatic provinces slipped out
of the grasp of the European masters of Constantinople. In 603 A.D.,
it looked as if Persia were at length in the position to deliver the final
blow in a war which had lasted for more than five centuries. By the
invasion of Chosroes and his successive captures of Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Egypt, it seemed as if the Persians had restored the
world-empire of Cambyses and Darius; but the Persians then
discovered, as Xerxes had done a millennium earlier, how
dangerous it is for Orientals, even when flushed by conquest, to
press Europeans too far. The Roman Emperor Heraclius, who never
before or afterwards gave much proof of military or political capacity,
from his besieged capital of Constantinople collected an army with
which he dashed into Persia in a manner worthy of Alexander
himself. After six brilliant campaigns he dictated to the Persians a
triumphant peace in the very heart of their empire[782]. A few years
later, and its shattered and disorganized remains fell an easy prey to
the Mahommedan invaders.
The effect of this long rivalry might have been expected to produce
in the Romans during its continuance a hearty dislike of the customs
and institutions of the nation opposed to them; but almost the exact
contrary was the result. It may be argued that Rome’s proved skill in
government was in no small measure due to her ready adoption of
all that seemed to her admirable in the nations that she overcame.
Or it may be that the influence which the memory of Alexander
exercised over all those who succeeded to his empire led them to
imitate him in his assumption of Persian manners. The fact remains
that, long before the division of the Roman Empire into East and
West, the Romans displayed a taste for Oriental luxury and
magnificence which seems entirely at variance with the simplicity
and austerity of the republican conquerors of Carthage. It is hardly
too much to say that while Alexander’s conscious aim was to make
Asia Greek, the Romans, on possessing themselves of his Asiatic
conquests, allowed themselves to become to a great extent
“Medized,” and showed an unexpected admiration for the habits and
culture of Alexander’s Persian subjects.
It may of course be said that this was in external matters only, and
that the “Persian furniture” which excited Horace’s wrath[783] might if it
stood alone be looked upon as merely a passing fashion; but the
Court ceremonial introduced by Diocletian argues a steady tendency
towards Persian customs and forms of government that must have
been in operation for centuries. The household of a Julian Caesar
was no differently arranged from that of a Roman noble of the
period, and his title of Prince of the Senate showed that he was only
looked upon as the first of his equals. But Diocletian was in all
respects but language a Persian emperor or Shah, and his style of
“Lord and God,” his diadem, his silken state dress, the elaborate
ritual of his court, and the long hierarchy of its officials, were all
designed to compel his subjects to recognize the fact[784]. As usual,
the official form of religion in the Roman Empire had for some time
given indications of the coming change in the form of government.
The sun had always been the principal natural object worshipped by
the Persians, and a high-priest of the Sun-God had sat upon the
Imperial throne of Rome in the form of the miserable Heliogabalus.
Only 13 years before Diocletian, Aurelian, son of another Sun-God’s
priestess and as virile and rugged as his predecessor was soft and
effeminate, had also made the Sun-God the object of his special
devotion and of an official worship. Hence Diocletian and his
colleague Galerius were assured in advance of the approval of a
large part of their subjects when they took the final plunge in 307
A.D.,and proclaimed Mithras, “the Unconquered Sun-God,” the
Protector of their Empire[785].
In spite of this, however, it is very difficult to say how Mithras
originally became known to the Romans. Plutarch says indeed that
his cult was first introduced by the Cilician pirates who were put
down by Pompey[786]. This is not likely to be literally true; for the
summary methods adopted by these sea-robbers towards their
Roman prisoners hardly gave much time for proselytism, while most
of the pirates whom Pompey spared at the close of his successful
operations he deported to Achaea, which was one of the few places
within the Empire where the Mithraic faith did not afterwards show
itself. What Plutarch’s story probably means is that the worship of
Mithras first came to Rome from Asia Minor, and there are many
facts which go to confirm this. M. Cumont, the historian of Mithraism,
has shown that, long before the Romans set foot in Asia, there were
many colonies of emigrants from Persia who with their magi or
priests had settled in Asia Minor, including in that phrase Galatia,
Phrygia, Lydia, and probably Cilicia[787]. When Rome began to
absorb these provinces, slaves, prisoners, and merchants from them
would naturally find their way to Rome, and in time would no doubt
draw together for the worship of their national deities in the way that
we have seen pursued by the worshippers of the Alexandrian Isis
and the Jewish exiles. The magi of Asia Minor were great supporters
of Mithridates, and the Mithridatic wars were no doubt responsible
for a large number of these immigrants.
Once introduced, however, the worship of Mithras spread like wild-
fire. The legions from the first took kindly to it, and this is the less
surprising when we find that many of them were recruited under the
earliest emperors in Anatolian states like Commagene, where the
cult was, if not indigenous, yet of very early growth[788]. Moreover the
wars of the Romans against the Persians kept them constantly in the
border provinces of the two empires, where the native populations
not infrequently changed masters. The enemy’s town that the legions
besieged one year might therefore give them a friendly reception the
next; and there was thus abundant opportunity for the acquaintance
of both sides with each others’ customs. When the Roman troops
marched back to Europe, as was constantly the case during the civil
wars which broke out on the downfall of the Julian house, they took
back with them the worship of the new god whom they had adopted,
and he thus became known through almost the whole of the Roman
Empire[789]. “From the shores of the Euxine to the north of Brittany
and to the fringe of the Sahara[790],” as M. Cumont says, its
monuments abound, and, he might have added, they have been met
with also in the Egyptian Delta, in Babylon, and on the northern
frontiers of India. In our own barbarous country we have found them
not only in London and York, but as far west as Gloucester and
Chester and as far north as Carlisle and Newcastle[791]. The Balkan
countries, like Italy, Germany, Southern France, and Spain, are full of
them; but there was one part of the Roman Empire into which they
did not penetrate freely. This was Greece, where the memories of
the Persian Wars long survived the independence of the country, and
where the descendants of those who fought at Salamis, Marathon,
and Thermopylae would have nothing to do with a god coming from
the invaders’ fatherland. It is only very lately that the remains of
Mithras-worship have been discovered at the Piraeus and at Patras,
in circumstances which show pretty clearly that it was there practised
only by foreigners[792].
Notwithstanding this popularity, it is not easy to say exactly what god
Mithras’ European worshippers considered him to be. If length of
ancestry went for anything in such matters, he might indeed claim a
greater antiquity than any deity of the later Roman Pantheon, with
the single exception of the Alexandrian gods. Mithras was certainly
worshipped in Vedic India, where his name of Mitra constantly
occurs in the sacred texts as the “shining one,” meaning apparently
the material sun[793]. He is there invoked in company with Varuna,
generally considered the god of the sky, and therefore according to
some, the prototype of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Jupiter[794]. His
appearance in a similar connection in the sacred books of the
Persians led the founders of the comparative study of religion to
think that he must have been one of the primitive gods of their
hypothetical Aryan race, and that his worship must go back to the
imaginary time when Persians and Hindus dwelt side by side in the
plains of Cashmere. But this theory is giving way before proof that
the original home of the Indo-European race was Europe, and has
been badly shaken by the discovery at Boghaz Keui of tablets
showing that the gods Mithra and Varuna were gods of the
Mitannians or Hittites[795] at some date earlier than 1500 B.C., and
therefore long before the appearance of the Persians in history. If the
worship of Mithras were not indigenous in Western Asia, it may
therefore well have come there independently of the Persians[796].
There is no doubt, however, that the roots of Mithras-worship went
very far down into the Persian religion. In the Yashts or hymns which
are the earliest evidence of primitive Iranian beliefs, Mithra—to use
the Avestic spelling of his name—frequently appears, not indeed as
the material sun, but as the “genius of the heavenly light” which
lightens the whole universe[797] and is the most beneficent among the
powers of Nature. Mithras is not here, however, the Supreme Being,
nor even the highest among the gods benevolent to man. This last
place is occupied in the Zend Avesta by Ahura Mazda, “the
omniscient lord,” who appears to be the Persian form of Varuna, the
god of the sky whom we have seen associated with Mitra in the
Vedas[798]. Nor is Mithras in the Zend Avesta one of the six
Amshaspands, the deified abstractions or personified attributes of
Ahura Mazda, who, in the later developments of the Persian religion,
occupy towards him much the same position that the “Roots” of
Simon Magus and the Aeons of the Pleroma among the Gnostics do
towards the Boundless Power or the Ineffable Bythos[799]. In the later
Avestic literature, he appears as the chief of the Izeds or Yazatas, a
race of genii created by Ahura Mazda, who are the protectors of his
universe and the helpers of mankind in their warfare against the
powers of darkness[800]. In the latest as in the earliest Persian view of
the personality of Mithras, therefore, it is plain that he occupies an
intermediate position between the Creator and man.
It is not, however, in the religion associated with the name of
Zoroaster that we must look for the origin of Mithraism. The date of
the sacred books of Mazdeism and the historical existence of
Zoroaster himself have recently been brought down to as late as the
VIIth century B.C.[801] and the appearance in Asia of the Persian tribes
as conquerors, whereas Mithras was, as we have seen, worshipped
in Asia Minor nearly a millennium earlier. Moreover, the strict dualism
which set Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil, in eternal and
perhaps equal opposition to Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness,
seems to have been unknown before the Sassanid reform in 226
A.D., by which time the worship of Mithras in Europe was at its
apogee[802]. M. Cumont is, therefore, doubtless right when he thinks
that Mithraism was derived not from Mazdeism, but from Magism or
the religion of the Magi, the tribe of Medes whose domination was
put an end to by Darius the son of Hystaspes, and whose name was
afterwards given to a priestly caste and has passed into our own
language as the root of the word “magic.”
That these Magi practised a religion different from that taught in the
Avestic literature is plain enough. The romantic story told by
Herodotus of the Magian who seized the throne of Persia during
Cambyses’ absence in Egypt on the pretence that he was the king’s
brother whom Cambyses had privily put to death[803], is fully
confirmed by Darius’ trilingual inscription on the Rock of Behistun,
first copied and deciphered by Sir Henry Rawlinson and lately
published in elaborate form by the British Museum[804]. Darius here
narrates how “a certain man, a Magian, Gaumata by name ... lied
unto the people (saying) ‘I am Smerdis, the son of Cyrus, the brother
of Cambyses.’ Then all the people revolted from Cambyses and
went over to him, even Persia and Media and the other provinces.”
Darius goes on to record that “thereupon Cambyses died by his own
hand[805],” that the seven Persian nobles overthrew the pretender
much in the way described by Herodotus, and that “I rebuilt the
temples of the gods, which that Gaumata, the Magian, had
destroyed. I restored that which had been taken away as it was in
the days of old[806].” This he tells us he did “by the grace of Ahura
Mazda,” and that by this grace he always acted. The memory of
these events was kept up by the festival of the Magophonia or
Massacre of the Magi which was yearly celebrated in Persia and
during which no Magus dared show himself in the streets[807]. Darius’
words show that there was a religious as well as a dynastic side to
the Magian revolt, though whether the false Smerdis restored the old
worship of the land, which he found in danger of being supplanted by
Zoroastrianism or the worship of Ahura Mazda, may still be doubtful.
In any event, the reformation or counter-reformation made by Darius
did not succeed in entirely uprooting the old Magian faith, for
Herodotus speaks of the Magi as still being in his time the priestly
caste among the Persians, and as acting as diviners and sacrificers
to the Achaemenian kings who ruled Persia up to Alexander’s
Conquest[808].
The Magian religion as it appears in Herodotus and other Greek
authors, however, seems to have shown none of the hostility to the
powers of darkness so apparent in the religious literature collected
by the Sassanian kings. “The whole circuit of the firmament” was,
according to Herodotus, their greatest god or Zeus; and he says that
they also “sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire and
water, and to the winds”; but that “they do not, like the Greeks,
believe the gods to have the same nature as men[809].” He also tells
us that later they borrowed from the Arabians and the Assyrians the
worship of a goddess whom he calls Mitra, and although he is
probably wrong as to the origin and sex of this deity, his evidence
shows that Semitic admixture counted for something in the Magian
worship. In other respects, the Magian seems to have been a
primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of nature or
elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic manner
of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little attention
to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that, like the
religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it would draw
no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and would be
as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those hostile to
man, as the good or benevolent. Plutarch, who describes the religion
of the Magi more than three centuries after Herodotus, when the
name of Zoroaster the Persian prophet and the dualistic belief
favoured by his teaching had long been popularly known in the West,
says that the Magi of his time held Mithras to be the “Mediator” or
intermediary between “Oromazes” or Light on the one hand, and
“Areimanios” or Darkness and Ignorance on the other, and that they
used to make bloody sacrifices to the last-named in a place where
the sun never comes[810]. It is easy to see how such a cult, without
the control of public ceremonies and with its unabashed traffic with
the powers of evil, would be likely to degenerate into compulsion or
magic.
There was, however, another popular superstition or belief which,
about the time when Mithraism made its appearance in Europe, had
spread itself over Western Asia. This was the idea that the positions
and changes of the heavenly bodies exercise an influence over the
affairs of the world and the lot both of kingdoms and individual men.
It probably began in Babylonia, where the inhabitants had from
Sumerian times shown themselves great observers of the stars, and
had been accustomed to record the omens that they drew from their
motions for the guidance of the kings[811]. This kind of divination—or
astrology to call it by a familiar name—received a great impulse after
Alexander’s Conquest, in the first place from the break up of the
Euphratean priestly colleges before referred to, and the driving out of
the lesser priests therein to get their own living, and then from the
fact that the scientific enquiry and mathematical genius of the
Greeks had made the calculation of the positions of the heavenly
bodies at any given date and hour a fairly simple matter to be
determined without direct observation[812]. It was probably no mere
coincidence that the Chaldaei and the Mathematici, as the
astrologers called themselves, should have swarmed at Rome under
just those emperors in whose reigns Mithraism began to push itself
to the front[813].
While we may be sure that these factors, the religion of the Magi, the
practice of magic, and the astrological art, all counted in the
composition of the worship of Mithras, we yet know but very little of
its tenets. No work has come down to us from any devotee of
Mithras which will give us the same light on the way his worshippers
regarded him that the romance of Apuleius and the encomium of
Aelius Aristides have cast on the mental attitude of the devotees of
the Alexandrian cult. The extensive books of Eubulus and Pallas on
Mithras and the history of his worship, which Porphyry tells us were
extant from the reign of Hadrian down to his own time[814], are
entirely lost, and our only source of information, except a very few
scattered notices in the Fathers and in profane writers like the
Emperor Julian and Porphyry himself, are the sculptures and
inscriptions which have been found in his ruined chapels. These
texts and monuments the scholarly care of M. Cumont has gathered
into two large volumes, which will always remain the chief source
from which later enquirers must draw their materials[815]. From their
study he comes to the conclusion that, in the religion of Mithras,
there figured above him the Mazdean gods of good and evil
respectively called in the Zend Avesta Ahura Mazda and Angro
Mainyus, or in more familiar language, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Behind
and above these again, he would place a Supreme Being called
Zervan Akerene or Boundless Time, who seems to be without
attributes or qualities, and to have acted only as the progenitor of the
opposing couple. This is at first sight very probable, because the
Orphic doctrine, which, as we have seen, made Chronos or Time the
progenitor of all the gods, was widely spread in Asia Minor before
Alexander’s Conquest, and the Persian colonies formed there under
his successors must therefore have come in frequent contact with
this most accommodating of schools[816]. Traditions of a sect of
Zervanists in Western Asia, who taught that all things came from
Infinite Time, are also to be found[817]. But most of these are recorded
after Mithraism had become extinct; and M. Cumont’s proofs of the
existence of this dogma in the European religion of Mithras can be
reduced on final analysis to a quotation from a treatise by Theodore,
the Christian bishop of Mopsuestia who died in 428 A.D., directed, as
it would seem, against the “Magi” of his time, in which he admits that
their dogmas had never been written, and that the sectaries in
question, whom he calls Magusaeans, said “sometimes one thing
and deceived themselves, and sometimes another and deceived the
ignorant[818].” M. Cumont’s identification of the lion-headed statue
often found in Mithraic chapels with the Supreme God of the system
has been shown elsewhere to be open to serious question, and the
figure itself to be susceptible of another interpretation than that which
he would put upon it[819]. On the whole, therefore, while M. Cumont’s
mastery of his subject makes it very dangerous to differ from him, it
seems that his theory of a Boundless Time as the pinnacle of the
Mithraist pantheon cannot be considered as proved.
Whether Ormuzd and Ahriman played any important part in the
Roman worship of Mithras is also doubtful. With regard to the first-
named, both Greeks and Romans knew him well and identified him
unhesitatingly with Zeus and Jupiter[820]. Hence we should expect to
find him, if represented at all on the Mithraic sculptures, with the
well-known features, the thunderbolt, and the eagle, which long
before this time had become the conventional attributes of the
Roman as well as of the Homeric father of gods and men. We are
not entirely disappointed, for we find in a bas-relief formerly in a
chapel of Mithras at Sissek (the ancient Sissia in Pannonia) and now
in the Museum at Agram, the bull-slaying scene in which Mithras
figures and which will be presently described, surmounted by an
arch on which is ranged Jupiter seated on his throne, grasping the
thunderbolt, wielding the sceptre, and occupying the place of honour
in a group of gods among whom we may distinguish Mars and
Mercury[821]. In another bas-relief of the same scene, now at the
Rudolfinum in Klagenfurt, he is depicted in a similar position in an
assembly of the gods, which although much mutilated seems to
show Zeus or Jupiter in the centre with Hera or Juno by his side[822].
But the most conclusive of these monuments is the great bas-relief
found at Osterburken in the Odenwald, wherein the arch
surmounting the usual bull-slaying scene contains an assembly of
twelve gods with Zeus in the centre armed with thunderbolt and
sceptre, while around him are grouped Apollo, Ares, Heracles, Hera,
Athena, Aphrodite, Nike, Poseidon, Artemis, Hades, and perhaps
Persephone[823]. When by the side of these we put the many
inscriptions left by the legionaries to “the holy gods of the fatherland,
to Jupiter best and greatest, and to the Unconquered One”; to
“Jupiter best and greatest, and to the divine Sun, the Unconquered
Sun,” and other well-known names of Mithras, there can be no doubt
that his worshippers used to adore him together with the head of the
Roman Pantheon, and that they considered Mithras in some way the
subordinate of or inferior to Jupiter[824]. Yet there is nothing to show
that the Mithraists as such identified in any way this Jupiter Optimus
Maximus with the Persian Ahura Mazda, Oromasdes, or Ormuzd, or
that they ever knew him by any of these outlandish names.
The case is different with Ormuzd’s enemy Ahriman, who evidently
was known by his Persian name to the Roman worshippers of
Mithras. In the Vatican can be seen a triangular marble altar
dedicated by a clarissimus named Agrestius who was a high-priest
of Mithras, to “the god Arimanius[825],” and altars with similar
inscriptions have been found at Buda-Pesth[826]. At a Mithraic chapel
in York also, there was found a statue, now in the Museum of the
Philosophical Society in that city, which bears an inscription to the
same god Arimanius[827]. There is therefore fairly clear evidence that
the Mithraists recognized Ahriman under his Persian name, and that
they sacrificed to him, as Plutarch said the “magi” of his time did to
the god whom he calls Hades[828], and this agrees with Herodotus’
statement that the Persians used to do the same to “the god who is
said to be beneath the earth[829].” Although this gave occasion to the
Christian Fathers to accuse the Mithraists of worshipping the devil,
we are not thereby bound to conclude that they looked upon
Arimanius as an essentially evil being. It seems more probable that
they considered him, as the Greeks did their Hades or Pluto, as a
chthonian or subterranean power ruling over a place of darkness and
discomfort, where there were punishments indeed, but not as a deity
insusceptible of propitiation by sacrifice[830], or compulsion by other
means such as magic arts[831]. It has been shown elsewhere that his
image in a form which fairly represents his attributes in this capacity
appears with some frequency in the Mithraic chapels, where a
certain amount of mystery attached to its exhibition[832]. It seems to
follow from these considerations that the worshippers of Mithras
attributed to their special god no inferiority to Ahriman as M.
Cumont’s argument supposes, and that the only power whom they
acknowledged as higher than Mithras himself was the Roman
equivalent of Ormuzd, the Jupiter Optimus Maximus adored
throughout the Roman Empire of their time as the head of the
Pantheon[833].
The connection of Mithras with the sun is also by no means easy to
unravel. The Vedic Mitra was, as we have seen, originally the
material sun itself, and the many hundreds of votive inscriptions left
by the worshippers of Mithras to “the unconquered Sun Mithras[834],”
to the unconquered solar divinity (numen) Mithras[835], to the
unconquered Sun-God (deus) Mithra[836], and allusions in them to the
priests (sacerdotes), worshippers (cultores), and temples (templum)
of the same deity leave no doubt open that he was in Roman times a
sun-god[837]. Yet this does not necessarily mean that he was actually
the day-star visible to mankind, and the Greeks knew well enough
how to distinguish between Apollo the god of light who was once at
any rate a sun-god, and Helios the Sun itself[838]. On the Mithraic
sculptures, we frequently see the unmistakable figure of Mithras
riding in the chariot of the Sun-God driven by the divinity with long
hair and a rayed nimbus, whom we know to be this Helios or his
Roman equivalent, going through some ceremony of consecration
with him, receiving messages from him, and seated side by side with
him at a banquet which is evidently a ritual feast. M. Cumont
explains this by the theory that Mithras, while in Persia and in the
earliest Aryan traditions the genius of the celestial light only[839], no
sooner passed into Semitic countries and became affected by the
astrological theories of the Chaldaeans, than he was identified with
their sun-god Shamash[840], and this seems as reasonable a theory
as can be devised. Another way of accounting for what he calls the
“at first sight contradictory proposition” that Mithras at once was and
was not the sun[841], is to suppose that while the Mithraists wished
those who did not belong to their faith to believe that they
themselves worshipped the visible luminary, they yet instructed their
votaries in private that he was a deity superior to it and in fact the
power behind it. As we shall see, the two theories are by no means
irreconcilable, although absolute proof of neither can yet be offered.
One can speak with more certainty about the Legend or mythical
history of Mithras which M. Cumont has contrived with rare acumen
to reconstruct from the monuments found in his chapels. It is
comprised in eleven or twelve scenes or tableaux which we will take
in their order[842]. We first see the birth of the god, not from the head
of his father Zeus like Athena, or from his thigh like Dionysos, but
from a rock, which explains his epithet of “Petrogenes” or rock-born.
The god is represented in this scene as struggling from the rock in
which he is embedded below the waist, and always uplifts in one
hand a broad knife of which we shall afterwards see him make use,
and in the other a lighted torch[843]. He is here represented as a boy,
and wears the Phrygian cap or so-called cap of liberty which is his
distinctive attribute, while the torch is doubtless, as M. Cumont
surmises, symbolical of the light which he is bringing into the
world[844]. The rock is sometimes encircled by the folds of a large
serpent, probably here as elsewhere a symbol of the earth, and is in
the Mithraic chapel discovered at Housesteads in Northumberland
represented in the form of an egg, the upper part remaining on the
head of the nascent god like an egg-shell on that of a newly-hatched
chicken[845]. This is probably due to some confusion or identification
with the Orphic legend of the First-born or Phanes who sprang from
the cosmic egg; but the central idea of the rock-birth seems to be
that of the spark, hidden as it were in the stone and leaping forth
when struck. In one or two examples of the scene, the miraculous
birth is watched by a shepherd or shepherds, which leads M.
Cumont to draw a parallel between this and the Adoration of the
Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.
The next two scenes are more difficult to interpret with anything
approaching certainty. In one of them[846], Mithras is represented as
standing upright before a tree from which he cuts or tears a large
branch bearing leaves and fruit. He is here naked, save for the
distinctive cap; but immediately after, he is seen emerging from the
leafage fully clothed in Oriental dress. In the next scene—the relative
order of the scenes seems settled by the places they most often
occupy on different examples of the same sculptures[847]—Mithras in
the Phrygian cap, Persian trousers, and flowing mantle generally
worn by him, kneels on one knee drawing a bow, the arrows from
which strike a rock in the distance and draw from it a stream of water
which a kneeling man receives in his hands and lifts to his mouth[848].
Several variants of this scene exist, in one of which a suppliant is
kneeling before the archer-god and raising his hands towards him as
if in prayer; while in another, the rock may well be a cloud. M.
Cumont can only suggest with regard to these scenes, that the first
may be an allusion to the Fall of Man and his subsequently clothing
himself with leaves as described in the Book of Genesis, and that the
second scene may depict a prolonged drought upon earth, in which
man prays to Mithras and is delivered by the god’s miraculous
production of rain. He admits, however, that this is pure conjecture,
and that he knows no Indian, Persian, or Chaldaean legend or myth
to which the scenes in question can be certainly attached. It seems
therefore useless to discuss them further here.
Passing on, we come to a series of scenes, the meaning of which is
more easily intelligible. In all of these a bull plays a principal part. It is
abundantly clear that this bull is no terrestrial creature, but is the
Goshurun or Heavenly Bull of the Zend Avesta, from whose death
come forth not only man, but beasts, trees, and all the fruits of the
earth[849]. In the Mithraic sculptures, we see the Bull first sailing over
the waters in a cup-shaped boat[850] like the coracles still used on the
Euphrates, or escaping from a burning stable to which Mithras and a
companion have set fire[851]. Then he is depicted grazing peaceably
or raising his head now and then as if alarmed by some sudden
noise[852]. Next he is chased by Mithras, who seizes him by the
horns, mounts him[853], and after a furious gallop casts him over his
shoulders, generally holding him by the hind legs so that the horned
head dangles to the ground[854]. In this position, he is taken into the
cave which forms the chapel of Mithras.
Here, if the order in the most complete monuments be followed, we
break off to enter upon another set of scenes which illustrate the
relations between Mithras and the sun[855]. In what again seems to be
the first in order, we see Mithras upright with a person kneeling
before him who, from the rayed nimbus round his head, is evidently
the god Helios or Sol[856]. In one representation of this scene, Mithras
extends his left hand towards this nimbus as if to replace it on the
head of its wearer[857] from which it has been displaced in yet another
monument[858], while in the other, he displays an object not unlike a
Phrygian cap which may, however, be, as M. Cumont suggests,
something like a water-skin[859]. Generally, Mithras is represented as
holding this object over the bared head of the kneeling Sun-God, as
if to crown him with it[860]. Then we find Mithras with the ray-crowned
Sun-God upright beside him, while he grasps his hand in token, as it
would seem, of alliance or friendship[861]. If we accept the hint
afforded by the theory that the rock yielding water on being split by
the arrows of Mithras is really a cloud producing the fertilizing rain,
we may imagine that we have here the unconquered god removing
clouds which obscure the face of the great life-giving luminary and
restoring to him the crown of rays which enables him to shed his
kindly light upon the earth. The earth would thus be made fit for the
creation of man and other animals which, as we shall see, follows;
but in any event, the meaning of the scene which shows the alliance
is, as M. Cumont has pointed out, not doubtful[862]. In one monument,
where Mithras grasps the hand of the person we have identified with
the Sun-God before an altar, he at the same time draws his sword,
as if to perform the exchange of blood or blood-covenant usual in the
East on swearing alliance[863]. Possibly the crowning scene, as M.
Cumont also suggests[864], is to be connected with Tertullian’s
statement that in the initiation of the Mithraist to the degree of miles
or soldier, he was offered at the sword’s point a crown, which he cast
away from him saying that Mithras was his crown. If so, it would
afford some proof that the initiate here, as in the mysteries of Isis,
was made to impersonate the sun, which is on other grounds likely
enough.
We return to the scenes with the Bull, which here reach their climax.
This is the sacrifice of the Bull by Mithras, which forms the central
point of the whole legend. Its representation, generally in bas-relief,
was displayed in the most conspicuous position in the apse of the
Mithraic chapel, where it occupied the place of the modern altar-
piece, and such art as the Roman sculptors succeeded in displaying
was employed to make it as impressive and as striking as
possible[865]. It shows the god grasping with his left hand the nostrils
of the beast, and kneeling with his left knee in the middle of the Bull’s
back, while with his right hand he plunges the broad-bladed dagger
with which he was armed at his birth into the Bull’s shoulder[866]. A
dog leaps forward to lap the blood flowing from the wound, while at
the same time a scorpion seizes the Bull by the genitals. A serpent
also forms part of the group, but his position varies in the different
monuments, while that of the other animals does not. Sometimes, he
lifts his head towards the blood, as if to share it with the dog,
sometimes he is extended along the ground beneath the Bull’s belly
in apparent indifference to the tragedy enacted above him[867]. Before
the Bull stands generally a youth clothed like Mithras himself in
Phrygian cap, tunic, and mantle, as well as the anaxyrides or tight
trousers in which the Greeks depicted most Easterns, while another
youth similarly attired stands behind the dying victim. These two
human figures are alike in every particular save that one of them
bears a torch upright with the flame pointing upwards, while the other
holds a similar torch reversed so that the flame juts towards the
earth. We know from a Latin inscription that the torch-bearer with
uplifted torch was called Cautes, he with the reversed one
Cautopates, but of neither name has any satisfactory derivation or
etymology yet been discovered[868].
The meaning of the group as a whole can, however, be explained by
the documents of the later Persian religion. The Bundahish tells us
that Ahura Mazda created before all things the Bull Goshurun, who
was killed by Ahriman, the god of evil, and that from his side came
forth Gayômort, first of men, while from his tail there issued useful
seed-plants and trees, from his blood the vine, and from his seed the
different kinds of beasts[869]. Save that the bull-slayer is here not the
god of evil but the lord of light himself, the myth is evidently the same
in the Mithraic bas-reliefs, for in some of the earliest monuments the
Bull’s tail is actually shown sprouting into ears of wheat, while in
others the production of animals as a consequence of the Bull’s
death may be indicated, as well as the birth of the vine[870]. That the
dog plays the part of the guardian of the Bull’s soul is probable from
what we know of later Persian beliefs[871], while the scorpion as the
creature of Ahriman may be here represented as poisoning the seed
of future life at its source[872]. That Mithras is not supposed to kill the
Bull from enmity or other personal reasons, but in obedience to
orders from some higher power, is shown by the listening pose of his
head during the sacrifice. This is M. Cumont’s opinion[873], as also
that the serpent here takes no active part in the affair, but is merely a
symbolic representation of the earth[874]. The whole drama is clearly
shown as taking place in a cave or grotto, as appears from the arch
of rocks which surmounts, and, as it were, acts as a frame to, the
Tauroctony or bull-slaying scene in most Mithraic chapels. This cave,
according to Porphyry, represents the universe.
The Legend, however, does not end with the death of the Bull. In the
chapel at Heddernheim, the great slab on which the Tauroctony is
sculptured in bas-relief is pivoted so as to swing round and display
on its other face another scene which we find repeated in a slightly
different form on many monuments[875]. Mithras and the Sun-God are
here shown as partaking of a ritual feast or banquet in which grapes
seem to figure. At Heddernheim, the grapes are tendered to the two
gods over the body of the dead bull by the two torch-bearing figures
Cautes and Cautopates, while on an arch above them various
quadrupeds, dogs, a boar, a sheep, and a cow, are seen springing
into life. In other monuments, the same scene generally appears as
a banquet at which Mithras and Helios are seated side by side at a
table sometimes alone, but at others in company with different
persons who can hardly be any other than initiates or
worshippers[876]. That this represents some sort of sacrament where
a drink giving immortality was administered seems probable, and its
likeness to representations of the Last Supper is sufficient to explain
the complaint of Justin Martyr and other Fathers that the devil had
set on the Mithraists to imitate in this and other respects the Church
of Christ[877]. The final scene of all comes when we see Mithras
arresting the glorious chariot of the Sun-God drawn by four white
horses, and, mounting therein, being driven off by the ray-crowned
Helios himself to the abode of light above the firmament[878]. In this
also, it is easy to see a likeness between representations of the
Ascension of Mithras and that of Elijah or even of Christ[879].
However this may be, the Legend of Mithras, as thus portrayed,
shows with fair closeness the belief of his worshippers as to his
place in the scheme of the universe. Mithras was certainly not the
Supreme God, a rank in the system filled by Ahura Mazda, or his
Latin counterpart, Jupiter Best and Greatest[880]. But this being, like
the Platonic Zeus and the Gnostic Bythos, was considered too great
and too remote to concern himself with the doings of the visible
universe, in which Mithras acts as his vicegerent. Whether Mithras
was or was not considered as in some sort the double or antitype of
the Supreme Being cannot be said; but it is worth noticing that in the
Vedas, as among the Hittites, Varuna and Mitra form an inseparable
couple who are always invoked together, and that the same seems
to have been the case with Ahura Mazda and Mithra in the oldest
religious literature of the Persians[881]. It may therefore well be that
the learned doctors of the Mithraic theology regarded their Supreme
Being and Mithras as two aspects of the same god, an idea that, as
we have seen, was current at about the same period among the
Gnostics. It is, however, impossible to speak with certainty on such a
point in the absence of any writings by persons professing the
Mithraic faith, and it is highly improbable that the rugged soldiers
who formed the majority of the god’s worshippers ever troubled
themselves much about such questions. For them, no doubt, and for
all, perhaps, but a few carefully-chosen persons, Mithras was the
Demiurge or Divine Artizan of the universe[882], which he governs in
accordance with the laws of right and justice, protecting and
defending alike man and those animals and plants useful to him
which Mithras has himself created from his own spontaneous
goodness. Hence he was the only god to whom they admitted
allegiance, and although the existence of other heavenly beings was
not denied, it is probable that most of them were looked upon as
occupying at the best a position less important to us than that of
Mithras himself.
It is probable, moreover, that all the scenes in the Mithraic sculptures
in which we have seen the god taking part were considered as being
enacted before the creation of man and in some heaven or world
midway between the abode of Infinite Light and this earth. That the
grotto into which Mithras drags the primordial Bull is no earthly
cavern is plain from Porphyry’s remark that the Mithraic cave was an
image of the universe[883], as well as from the band of zodiacal
figures or the arch of rocks which sometimes encloses the bas-
reliefs, the sky being looked upon by the Babylonians as a rocky
vault. The sun and moon in their respective chariots also appear
above the principal scene; and a further hint as to its whereabouts
may be found in the fact that the flowing mantle of Mithras is
sometimes depicted as spangled with stars, thereby indicating that
the scenes in which he appears are supposed to take place in the
starry firmament. Hence is explained the epithet of μεσίτης or
Mediator, which Plutarch gives him[884], and which should be
interpreted not as intercessor but as he who occupies a position
midway between two places[885]. That the higher of these in this case
was the Garôtman or abode of Infinite Light of the Avestic literature,
there can, it would seem, be no question; but what was the lower?
Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves
imposed upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by

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List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction: The Challenges, Relevance, and Fun of Soft Matter . . . . . . . . . 1

I Groundwork: from classic results to soft matter today 17

1.12 Lubrication approximation for thin ﬁlm ﬂow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

3 Brownian Motion, Thermal Fluctuations, and Diﬀusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

3.2 Langevin equation for Brownian motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

II Soft Matter Phases 161

6 Liquid Crystals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

7 Interfaces, Surfaces, and Membranes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

III Advanced Topics 349

8 Pattern Formation out of Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

9 Active Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405

9.6.3 Odd elastodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424

IV Perspective: new frontiers of soft matter 461

10 From Designing Matter to Mimicking Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463

Appendix: Notation and Symbols Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499

Image Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577

1.24 A bouncing droplet due to Marangoni ﬂow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

2.41 Dislocations and disclinations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

4.25 Typical interaction potential between colloids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

8.34 A propagating pulse in an excitable medium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

Leiden, Chicago, and Paris

Welcome to our exploration of the challenges, relevance, and fun

(d) Clay, cornstarch

(i) Explore new phases (g) Explore

also a great playground for illustrating general concepts and con-

What makes soft matter special and inspiring to us is illustrated

fractal dimension of such aggregates is typically determined exper-

particles is increased even more, to around 60%, the opposite eﬀect

d. Particles with irregular shapes: Even more complex rheology

f. Droplets rather than solid particles: Microemulsions

g. A model system with which to probe the dynamics of

h. A model system with which to study the glass transition

i. Playing with the shape of the hard core particles

PLASTIC CRYSTALS CRYSTALS LIQUID C RYSTALS

j. Tuning the interactions: Toward programmable matter

thermal ﬂuctuations don’t matter—display striking similarities to

I.2.1 Our approach in this book

The aim of this book is to serve as a textbook on the basic phenom-

I.2.2 The hydrodynamic perspective

We started this chapter with a bottom-up approach aimed at il-

Translation Rotation Rotation

Displacement Director Polarization

Sound waves Orientational Polarization

Dislocation Disclination Aster

The hydrodynamic approach is a prescription to construct ’coarse-

a. Spontaneously broken symmetries and associated

b. Hydrodynamic modes and topological defects

c. Classifying (soft) condensed matter phases

In the remainder of this book, we introduce the main classes of soft

I.2.3 A ﬁeld relevant to society

Beyond its appeal from a basic science perspective, soft matter is