Structured Fluids: Polymers, Colloids, Surfactants

by Thomas A. Witten, Philip A. Pincus

Overview

Over the last thirty years, the study of liquids containing polymers, surfactants, or colloidal particles has developed from a loose assembly of facts into a coherent discipline with substantial predictive power. These liquids expand our conception of what condensed matter can do. Such structured-fluid phenomena dominate the physical environment within living cells. This book teaches how to think of these fluids from a unified point of view showing the far-reaching effects of thermal fluctuations in producing forces and motions. Keeping mathematics to a minimum, the book seeks the simplest explanations that account for the distinctive scaling properties of these fluids. An example is the growth of viscosity of a polymer solution as the cube of the molecular weight of the constituent polymers. Another is the hydrodynamic radius of a colloidal aggregate, which remains comparable to its geometrical radius even though the density of particles in the aggregate becomes arbitrarily small. The book aims for a simplicity, unity and depth not found in previous treatments, and includes numerous figures, tables and problems. It will be an ideal textbook for teaching undergraduates in physical science how to understand soft matter, but will also be of interest to industrial scientists, who want to gain a broader understanding of soft matter systems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199583829
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/12/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Thomas A. Witten was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and a staff scientist at Exxon Research and Engineering before joining the University of Chicago in 1989 as a professor of physics.

Table of Contents

1. Overview2. Fundamentals3. Polymer molecules4. Polymer solutions5. Colloids6. Interfaces7. Surfactants

Editorial Reviews

"Structural Fluids is well constructed and a pleasure to readStructural Fluids will be widely used and will be a must read for any student of soft condensed matter physics. Even practicing condensed matter physicists will gain a great deal of insight from it, and I predict it will become a fixture of many bookshelves. It certainly is on mine."—David Weitz, Physics Today

From the Publisher