Soft Solids and Complex Fluids

 

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Updated (May 9th) with schedule and arrival information!

Welcome to the webpage for Soft solids and Complex Fluids, an annual summer school for graduate students  in soft matter and statistical physics hosted by the Physics Department at UMass Amherst.  We are holding the first of these annual schools from Sunday June 1st, to Thursday June 5th, 2008.

There is a growing level of activity in physics departments in fields whose concepts and practices are inspired by the ideas and methods of classical condensed matter and statistical physics. These include liquid crystals, granular matter, solid mechanics, polymeric and colloidal physics and micro-fluidics, as well as biophysics. However, courses in the basic techniques common to these areas do not find a standard place in graduate curricula of most physics departments.  Our hope is to help fill this need.

This year's courses and lecturers will be -

Soft random solids: Their structure and elasticity Paul Goldbart University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  
Liquid crystal physics Robert Pelcovits Brown University
Low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics Eric Lauga UC San Diego  
Physics of colloids Tony Dinsmore University of Massachusetts , Amherst

Our target audience consists of graduate students who are early in their career in a research group.  Our lecturers will anticipate that you have a standard background in graduate classical and quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics and the associated mathematical methods.  If you are a graduate student who meets this description, please do visit our application page to apply.  

Supported by

Office of Research and the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, UMass Amherst

           

 

 


Narayanan Menon (menon@physics.umass.edu)