Abstract :

Soft matter refers to a class of materials whose basic building blocks are at least of the order of  nanometers i.e. significantly larger than an atom and the appropriate energy scales are thermal. Soft materials  include a myriad of systems such as colloids, polymers, microemulsions, gels, foams, liquid crystals and a number of  biological materials. The word ‘soft’ highlights the low elastic moduli of these materials and they are deformed by  thermal or mechanical stresses comparable to the magnitude of the thermal fluctuations. Under confinement, soft  matter displays interesting properties, which are not observed, in their bulk counterpart and continues to be a  fertile ground for future research. The geometrical confinement is known to reduce the degrees of freedom and may as  well introduce new molecular interactions among its constituents. In context of this talk, the confinement refers to  soft materials at the solid surfaces, in the proximity of fluctuating membranes and inside nano-channels with hard  walls. Some remarkable confinement-induced effects such as electrostatic trapping of a colloidal monolayer, buckling  assisted layering transitions and the emergence of anisotropic pair correlations in colloids that are observed from  experiments will be discussed. In addition, anomalous water desorption phenomena, existence of multiple glass  transition temperatures in thin polymer films and the accelerated dynamics of polymers under soft confinement will  be presented. 

    

About the Speaker:

Dr. Dillip K. Satapathy obtained his M. Sc. from the Utkal University, Bhubaneswar in India and  earned his Ph. D. degree from Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Humboldt University, Berlin Germany.  After postdoctoral research at Swiss Light Source (SLS), Switzerland and at the Department of Physics, University of  Fribourg, Switzerland, he joined the faculty of the Physics Department of Indian Institute of Technology Madras,  India, in 2012 where he is now an associate professor. His current research interests are in the area of  experimental soft condensed matter physics with special focus on swelling kinetics, wrinkling, glass transition in  polymer thin films,  self assembly of colloids and surfactants, ferroelectric and thermoelectric properties of  semi-crystalline polymers.​