Themed collection Soft Matter Emerging Investigators

This issue of Soft Matter highlights the work of emerging investigators in the field of soft matter. Dr Neil Hammond, Executive Editor of Soft Matter, introduces the issue.

We review how micrometer-scale particles in suspension can form clogs in microfluidic systems and modify the fluid flow.

In this review, we discuss the ion specificities of artificial macromolecules based on direct and indirect ion–macromolecule interactions.

Knowledge of the chain conformations and phase behavior of conjugated polymers is synthesized as starting points for better understanding the structure–property relationships of this class of materials.

Stochastic heat engines can be built using colloidal particles trapped using optical tweezers.

When two miscible fluids are brought in contact, an effective off-equilibrium surface tension arises that controls the shape and the evolution of their interface. We review more than a century of investigations of the effective surface tension in molecular and complex fluids.

Emerging polar nematics exhibits nontrivial topologies in confinement, controlled by the magnitude of the polarization.

The active dynamics of chromosomes in living cells is investigated based on the notion of tension propagation.

A drop of liquid deposited between two flexible fibers exerts a capillary force that leads to a collapsed state at small angle.

Ultrasound waves drive shape oscillations of particle-coated microbubbles. During the ultrafast, non-uniform deformation of the interface, particles are expelled from the antinodes of the shape oscillations.

We study the linear viscoelastic properties and the dilution effect of entangled linear chains diluted in oligomers or in real solvents.

Hard core-soft shell nanoparticles show a rich structural behavior under compression when confined at a fluid interface and present crucial differences to fully deformable hydrogel particles.

Tunable hygromorphic responses achieved in bilayer composites derived from electrospun mats and low molecular weight gelators.

Poly(N-vinylcaprolactam) (PVCL) is a new temperature-responsive type of polymer microgel with improved biocompatibility as compared to more commonly used poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM).

The self-assembly of amphiphilic Janus colloids in microfluidic channels under Poiseuille flow is studied using computer simulations. The aggregates grow in the weakly sheared channel center, whereas a distinct cluster breakup occurs in strongly sheared channel regions.

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of a model spherical microorganism, called squirmer, suspended in a viscoelastic fluid undergoing unconfined shear flow.

Epoxy/carboxylic acid-based vitrimers relax stress in two steps.

We consider how interactions between many floating, electrically charged particles modify the interaction energy: interfacial deformations due to many particles are larger than those of an isolated particle. This leads to a larger binding energy than would be expected based on the pair-wise interaction potential.

We investigate the drainage dynamics of thin liquid foam films containing PNiPAM microgel suspensions with two cross-linking densities (1.5 and 5 mol% BIS) and at two microgel concentrations (0.1 and 1% wt).

Alternating complex electric fields were employed to direct the self-assembly of spherical and ellipsoidal composite microgels to create, among other structures, 2D hexagonal arrays of vertically aligned ellipsoidal particles and 3D rewritable structures.

Multifrequency atomic force microscopy is used to gain sub-nanometre insights into the structure of aquaporin 0 and its interface with the surrounding water.

Supported lipid membranes exhibit two different stress response mechanisms to substrate deformation.

Block copolymers carrying acid groups exhibited rich phase sequences with the addition of ionic liquid in which the cation/anion ratio in the ionic liquid exerted profound effects on the segregation strength and topology of the self-assembled structures.

By employing a new computational framework, we show that the nanoparticle distribution after solvent annealing in block copolymer thin films depends on the solvent evaporation rate.

Motivated by recent experimental results on glassy polymer nanoparticles, we develop a minimal theoretical framework for the glass transition in spherical confinement.

The apparent contact angle and contact angle hysteresis of a droplet on liquid infused surfaces have strong dependence on the relative size between the droplet and its surrounding wetting ridge.

We introduce a new method to excite a specific mode (left) as obtained in the normal mode analysis (right), but with much lower computational and memory costs.

We investigated the electro-coalescence of two liquid marbles and systematically characterized the effects of different operating parameters on it.

Systems of spherical nanoparticles with capping ligands have been shown to self-assemble into beautiful superlattices of fascinating structure and complexity.