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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. The text is supplemented by numerous figures, tables and problems to aid the student.
Synopsis
Keeping mathematics to a minimum, Witten (physics, University of Chicago) offers a unified framework for the study of fluids containing polyatomic structures such as polymer molecules or colloidal grains. Treatment takes a scaling approach, focusing on how to account in the simplest way for the length, time, and energy scales that characterize each phenomenon. Important concepts are illustrated with problems, explained solutions, and experiments using household materials. Although the book is written to be accessible to undergraduates in physical science, it will also be of interest to industrial scientists who want to gain a broader understanding of soft matter systems. Students are assumed to have background in statistical physics and a working knowledge of Fourier transformation. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR