Scientific Highlights

2026-05-12T15:40:16+02:000000001631202605
A liquid drop impacting a rigid non-wetting substrate starts spreading laterally (top column), whereas an elastic sphere deforms slightly and bounces off (bottom column). A new work bridges these two limits and offers a general framework for liquid-to-elastic transitions. Image copyright: Front cover image from S. Jana et al., Soft Matter 22, 2226-2236 (2026), https://doi.org/10.1039/D5SM01078K licensed under CC BY 3.0 by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
2026-05-12T15:40:16+02:000000001631202605

Impact with Memory: How Soft Materials Bridge Liquids and Elastics

Even a familiar phenomenon like a bounce can reveal new insights into the properties of soft matter, as a new study by researchers from, among others, the SoftComp partner Durham University, UK, demonstrates... (Read more)
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2025-12-17T15:45:51+01:000000005131202512
Fig. 1: Sketch of the polarization-density phase diagram in the temperature (T)-pressure (p) thermodynamic plane obtained from classical density functional theory. Copyright: 2024 the Authors. Published by PNAS under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
2025-12-17T15:45:51+01:000000005131202512

Water’s Hidden Switch: How Ferroelectricity May Trigger Its Mysterious Phase Transitions

Water behaves in strangely unique ways—even under everyday conditions—and scientists have long sought the origins of its anomalies. A new study lead by SoftComp partner Ca’ Foscari University of Venice reveals a surprising... (Read more)
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2025-12-15T15:11:06+01:000000000631202512
Capillary waves observed at the boundary between water and glycerol in microfluidic flows. Copyright: the authors, published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 054001 (2025), DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.054001, permission granted by the American Physical Society 2025.
2025-12-15T15:11:06+01:000000000631202512

Capillary Waves Found Between Fully Miscible Fluids

Capillary waves—tiny ripples normally seen only at the sharp boundary between liquids that do not mix—have now been observed between liquids that do mix completely. Using microfluidic experiments, researchers around SoftComp partner CNRS-Montpellier... (Read more)
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