After successful completion of the course, students are able to reproduce the subjects detailed in the course content in oral form. Furthermore, the students are able to read and understand scientific papers in the field of colloidal science.
Soft matter systems – such as colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, and proteins – are ubiquitous in everyday life and the study of their thermodynamic and dynamic properties covers a wide range of active research fields reuniting on a highly interdisciplinary level scientists from physics, chemistry, and biology. Among soft matter systems, colloidal dispersions stem for offering a vast play field to investigate different phenomena – such as phase separation, glassy dynamics, self-assembly and crystallization – at several length scales. Theoretically, colloidal systems can be frequently captured by toy models; numerically, they can be reproduced with conceptually simple algorithms; experimentally, they can be often investigated with unsophisticated experimental setups. Despite this apparent simplicity, colloidal dispersions are not only a bed test to understand many phenomena occurring in atomic/molecular systems, but are also able to significantly extend the possibilities offered by them. Crystals or amorphous states never observed in hard matter have been already observed and the large freedom in the design of novel complex colloids is nowadays leading to the production of entirely new classes of particles with specific properties, thus leading to the emergence of, for instance, bio-mimetic and meta-materials with many applications in, for instance, drug delivery, solar cells optimization and catalysis.
