Center for Soft Matter Research Department of Physics Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences New York University

The Center for Soft Matter Research

Founded in 2004, the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University is dedicated to scientific inquiry at the interface between physics, chemistry, biology and engineering.

Located in the Meyer Physics Building at the corner of Washington Place and Broadway in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York City, the CSMR occupies a newly constructed state-of-the-art laboratory complex featuring close integration between chemical and materials synthesis, device fabrication, and physical analysis.

Soft Condensed Matter Physics

From the smallest subatomic particles to the largest-scale cosmological structures, hierarchies of organization and function emerge from the interplay of nominally simple forces acting among large numbers of nominally simple objects. Profound similarities in these emergent properties suggest that many might be explained by just a few fundamental organizing principles.

Research in soft condensed matter physics seeks to discover and exploit these principles by investigating special classes of highly organized materials and model systems. These generally share three characteristics in common: Their collective and cooperative behavior yields striking patterns illustrative of general themes of self-organization; their microscopic degrees of freedom are readily experimentally accessible; and their properties, both microscopic and macroscopic, have immediate technological applications.

Examples range from the molecular scale, including nanoclusters, liquid crystals, polymers, and proteins, to the mesoscale, including colloids, micelles, emulsions, and vesicles, to the macroscopic scale, including living cells, grains of sand, and a host of everyday items. In all of these systems, microscopic interactions compete with random thermal forces and externally applied forces to give rise to structural phase transitions, glass transitions, and exotic patterns at many scales. By studying how these processes unfold microscopically, we intend to discover why. General lessons learned from these studies should apply to physical systems at all scales. Once understood, the same principles can be used to create new and improved materials, devices, and systems for practical applications and to exert new levels of control over biological and industrial processes.

Relevant experimental probes for these systems include electron microscopy and scanning-probe microscopy for atomic-scale structural analysis, digital video microscopy for tracking the motions of individual objects, rheometry for measuring macroscopic viscoelastic properties, and optical trapping for organizing and probing mesoscopic materials. All of the techniques and more are developed, perfected and applied by researchers at NYU's Center for Soft Matter Research.