Topics in Soft Condensed Matter Theory: From Macromolecules to Hierarchically Structured Soft Materials

软物质是指聚合物、液晶、表面活性剂溶液、胶体悬浮液和脂类等材料。这些材料通常存在于塑料、药品、食品和生物材料中。这些材料最耐人寻味的特性之一是它们能够自组装成复杂的层次化结构，并在许多长度范围内有序化。自组装的分层结构材料对先进材料至关重要，更重要的是对生物有机体至关重要，因为我们是复杂自组装的完美例子。这项研究的目的是发展基于分子的理论来解释和预测自组装软材料的出现、稳定性和物理性质。从我们的研究中获得的知识将成为制造负担得起的纳米结构软材料的一个有利因素，这些材料具有所需的性能，用于药物输送载体和数据存储介质等应用。

Soft matter refers to materials such as polymers, liquid crystals, surfactant solutions, colloidal suspensions, and lipids. These materials are commonly found in plastics, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs and biomaterials. One of the most intriguing properties of these materials is their ability to self-assemble into complex hierarchical structures with ordering over many length scales. Self-assembled hierarchically structured materials are paramount to advanced materials, and more importantly, to biological organisms as we are the perfect example of complex self-assembly. The objective of the proposed research is to develop molecule-based theories to explain and predict the emergence, stability and physical properties of self-assembled soft materials. The knowledge gained from our research will be an enabling factor in the engineering of affordable nanostructured soft materials with desired properties for applications such as drug delivery vehicles and data storage media.