Dhrubaditya Mitra

Soft Matter and Fluid Physics

I teach this course at every fall semester. The online organization of courses in Stockholm University have moved to its own system, so the material here is updated once a year after I finish teaching.

In reality, this is a very broad topic. I classify any topic to be within soft matter if it is within the ambit of Phys. Rev. E. It is not easy to find good introductory material in one book.

There two ways to approach a subject like that. One is the way biologists do, classify the objects and then study them individually. For example, divide the objects into solid, normal fluid, polymers, liquid crystals, biomaterial etc and then treat them individually. Many books on Soft Matter takes this approach. The other is to find find out the fundamental unity between the topics, build a farm theoretical foundation and then deiversify. My goal is in this introductory course is to give a sound theoretical foundation. I assume that the students know Statistical Mechanics at an elementary level and know vector calculus and partial differential equations at the level necessary for a graduate electrodynamics course.

Here I is some of the source material organized in degree of complexity.