Front Cover; SUSSP Proceedings; Lecturers; Preface; Contents; 1. Introduction: Coarse graining in biological soft matter; 2. Introduction to colloidal systems; 3. The physics of floppy polymers; 4. Self-assembly and properties of lipid membranes; 5. Some aspects of membrane elasticity; 6. Introduction to electrostatics in soft and biological matter; 7. Thermal Barrier Hopping in Biological Physics; 8. Elasticity and dynamics of cytoskeletal laments and their networks; 9. Twisting and stretching DNA: Single-molecule studies
Summary
Soft condensed matter physics, which emerged as a distinct branch of physics in the 1990s, studies complex fluids: liquids in which structures with length scale between the molecular and the macroscopic exist. Polymers, liquid crystals, surfactant solutions, and colloids fall into this category. Physicists deal with properties of soft matter systems that are generic and largely independent of chemical details. They are especially fascinated by the way soft matter systems can harness Brownian motion to self-assemble into higher-order structures
Notes
"The chapters in this book originated as lectures in the NATO Advanced Science Institute (ASI) and Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics (SUSSP) 59 entitled Soft condensed matter physics in molecular and cell biology held in Edinburgh from 29 March to 8 April 2004"--Preface
