Theoretical study of soft matter systems

软物质是一个涉及物理学、化学、生物学和材料科学的跨学科研究领域。它研究的物理系统可以相对容易地变形响应外部和内部的物理和化学条件。例子包括胶体、聚合物、凝胶、液晶和一些生物系统。这些材料与传统的固态材料竞争，有时甚至超过传统的固态材料。软物质理论是由诺贝尔奖得主皮埃尔-吉尔勒·德热纳（Pierre-Gilles de Gennes）等先驱创立的，在过去半个世纪里，无论是在基础研究还是应用研究方面，软物质理论都取得了巨大的新发展。

Soft matter is a cross disciplinary research field involving physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science. It studies physical systems that can be deformed relatively easily in response to external and internal physical and chemical conditions. Examples include colloids, polymers, gels, liquid crystals, and several biological systems. These materials compete with and sometimes outperform the traditional solid-state materials. Founded by pioneers such as Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, soft matter theory is a field that has seen vast new developments in the last half century, in both fundamental and applied research.      This proposal presents a comprehensive soft-matter-theory research program that integrates a number of important and challenging problems involving polymers, membranes, and liquid crystals. In our theoretical treatment, a common ground is the use of statistical physics in studying these systems. Some new directions include: the development of a framework for the Flory-Huggins interaction energy and incompressibility condition of semiflexible polymer melts consisting of molecules for which the orientational dependence is importance, the relevance of Rayleigh instability in defining the conformation of charged vesicles, the onset of Casimir force caused by fluctuating polymer densities on embedded particles, vesicle translocation kinetics, vesicle tabulation and pearling dynamics, DNA packing structure, transition kinetics between defect liquid-crystal states, and liquid-crystal polymers in confinement. The exciting discoveries based on this proposal will significantly advance the fundamental understanding of soft matter --- a playground for constructing new materials of tomorrow.       Over the last 10 years, my research group has developed cutting-edge tools that can be readily exploited to tackle these new directions. They include: the self-consistent field theory for wormlike polymer chains, three-dimensional vesicle modeling based on triangulation of a fluid surface, density-functional models for liquid-crystal systems, and Monte Carlo simulations based on Wang-Landau type weights. By its explicit design, this multifaceted research program is ideally suited for training MSc- and PhD-level graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The research problems will intellectually challenge my research group hence the trained HQP in their pathways to make substantial impact in academic and industrial research.