Soft-matter is a vast field of research at the interfaces between physics, chemistry and biology. It consists in the study of the physical properties of composite objects described by a characteristic energy scale of the excitations of a few room temperature thermal energy.
The studied object include, e.g. liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, and a number of biological materials, e.g. DNA (mechanical and structural response for instance), ATP generated reaction (actin-myosin cycle)...
The studies of soft-matter objects usually consist in the description of some chemical and/or biological properties using the methods of statistical (organisation, ageing, phase transition, linear and non-linear response, ...) as well as elastic (membrane, foam, and gels deformations, ...) or fluid mechanics (low-dimension fluid mechanics among other, ...) physical models.
Soft-matter is one of the most active branch of research at the beginning of the 21-st century, having a lot of possible industrial applications.
