This award, which is funded jointly by the Particulate and Multiphase Processes program and the International Science and Engineering section, will provide travel support for US students and junior researchers to attend a summer institute in Udine, Italy from June 30 to July 4, 2014. The summer school is titled: Flowing Soft Matter: Bridging the Gap between Statistical Physics and Fluid Mechanics. The theme of the summer school is to understand how the complimentary tools of statistical physics and fluid mechanics can lead to new insights into the physics of flowing soft matter. The materials under consideration at the summer school will include polymer solutions, colloidal suspensions, gels, and emulsions, which are found in many important products. Improving our ability to process these materials effectively and efficiently will benefit a variety of industries. By participating in the institute, US students and young researchers will gain unique opportunities to learn from international experts, meet key international leaders in their research fields, and exchange ideas and experiences with international peers.
The summer school will provide participants with an overview of the field of flowing soft matter and will examine methods that use statistical physics and fluid mechanics to improve our ability to predict quantitatively the behavior of rheologically challenging materials. The instructors and participants in the institute will be from the US, UK, France, Italy, and other European countries. The institute is supported by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) and UNESCO. European participants are supported by their home countries. This award will provide similar support for US participants.
The dynamics and rheological properties of flowing soft matter have excited much research interest in the last few years in fields as diverse as physics, biophysics, materials science, chemical and mechanical engineering. These complex materials, which lie at the interface between fluids and soft solids, are as diverse as polymer solutions, colloidal suspensions, emulsions, gels, granular matter, and biological materials such as the cytoskeleton, bacterial suspensions and cellular tissues. The mechanical properties of these various systems result from the subtle interplay between the microstructure of the material on small scales and the forces driving the flows. Because of the rich variety and high complexity of these systems, many approaches have been developed over the years to describe their macroscopic properties. Two main complementary descriptions have emerged in different communities: on the one hand, these complex fluids can be described as continua using the equations of fluid mechanics with phenomenological constitutive laws; on the other hand, they can also be described using non-equilibrium statistical physics. Both approaches have their merits, and their combination has proven to yield outstanding advances in the understanding of the large-scale mechanical properties of some complex systems such as polymeric fluids. However, over the last 20 years, interactions between the fluid-mechanics, soft-condensed-matter and statistical-physics communities have been limited. To enhance education in these important areas of physics and engineering and to help bridge the gap between these two approaches, the PI co-organized (with D. Bartolo of Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon) a Summer School on "Soft Flowing Matter" targeted at advanced graduate students as well as young researchers in both physics and engineering. The goals of the school were twofold: first, present the participants with an overview of the exciting field of flowing soft matter, with focus on a few topics of active research interest; second, reconcile the statistical-physics and fluid-mechanics descriptions of these systems, by bringing together lecturers from both communities to discuss similar problems from the perspective of their own discipline. The contents of the School articulated around three main themes: (1) Flows and Fluctuations in Viscoelastic Fluids, (2) Structure and Mechanics of Active Fluids, and (3) Flows and Arrest in Dense Suspensions and Granular Materials. These themes were selected to reflect current interests in soft-matter research, while being distinct enough from one another to provide a broad and general introduction of the field to the participants. On each theme, two lecturers of different but complementary backgrounds provided a set of 4 lectures on a subject related to their research interests. The lectures included both introductory material and more advanced research material. In addition, participants to the School were offered the opportunity to give a short presentation on their own research. The School took place from June 30 to July 4 2014 at the International Center for Mechanical Sciences in Udine Italy. It was attended by a group of 36 students from 9 different countries, including 8 students from the United States, whose expenses were partially covered by this NSF Grant.
