Abstract
As an opening lecture to the French-Swedish neutron scattering school held in Uppsala (6th to 9th of December 2016), the basic concepts of both soft matter science and neutron scattering are introduced. Typical soft matter systems like self-assembled surfactants in water, microemulsions, (co-)polymers, and colloids are presented. It will be shown that widely different systems have a common underlying physics dominated by the thermal energy, with astonishing consequences on their statistical thermodynamics, and ultimately rheological properties – namely softness. In the second part, the fundamentals of neutron scattering techniques and in particular small-angle neutron scattering as a powerful method to characterize soft matter systems will be outlined.
Highlights
Soft condensed matter has grown into a rather wide and mature scientific discipline over the past 50 years, unifying different branches of physics, chemistry, and biology – with their interfacial disciplines physical chemistry, biophysics, etc. – into a common approach mainly characterized by the importance of entropy
While different aspects of neutron scattering will be presented in detail in the following lectures, we restrict ourselves here to a discussion of small-angle scattering as a tool to characterize the distribution of both volumes and surfaces in space, with some hints to application of other scattering techniques to soft matter, like reflectometry, GISANS, and QENS, all three techniques are discussed in dedicated chapters in this volume
The energy of the neutron is comparable to the thermal energy kT, which we have seen to be characteristic for soft matter systems
Summary
Soft condensed matter has grown into a rather wide and mature scientific discipline over the past 50 years, unifying different branches of physics, chemistry, and biology – with their interfacial disciplines physical chemistry, biophysics, etc. – into a common approach mainly characterized by the importance of entropy. Feringa) in Stockholm, which was truly an extraordinary event In this short introduction – short with respect to entire textbooks available on the field of soft matter and neutron scattering [1, 2], see ref. [3, 4] from previous neutron schools – , I will outline the fundamental concepts and properties of soft condensed matter, namely viscoelasticity, and its link to microstructure and thermal motion. These concepts are illustrated with the main sub-disciplines of soft matter: from surfactants and microemulsions, to polymers and copolymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. While different aspects of neutron scattering will be presented in detail in the following lectures, we restrict ourselves here to a discussion of small-angle scattering as a tool to characterize the distribution of both volumes and surfaces in space, with some hints to application of other scattering techniques to soft matter, like reflectometry, GISANS (grazing incidence small-angle neutron scattering), and QENS (quasi-elastic neutron scattering), all three techniques are discussed in dedicated chapters in this volume
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