Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of physics. The society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than twenty science meetings each year. APS is a member society of the American Institute of Physics. Since January 2021 the organization has been led by chief executive officer Jonathan Bagger.
Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy, and that entropy is considered the dominant factor. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. When soft materials interact favorably with surfaces, they become squashed without an external compressive force. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to the more complex cases found in soft matter, in particular, to the behaviors of liquid crystals and polymers.
Physical Review Letters (PRL), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the Journal Citation Reports impact factor and the journal h-index proposed by Google Scholar, many physicists and other scientists consider Physical Review Letters to be one of the most prestigious journals in the field of physics.
The European Physical Journal is a joint publication of EDP Sciences, Springer Science+Business Media, and the Società Italiana di Fisica. It arose in 1998 as a merger and continuation of Acta Physica Hungarica, Anales de Física, Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, Il Nuovo Cimento, Journal de Physique, Portugaliae Physica and Zeitschrift für Physik. The journal is published in various sections, covering all areas of physics.
The Boltzmann Medal is a prize awarded to physicists that obtain new results concerning statistical mechanics; it is named after the celebrated physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. The Boltzmann Medal is awarded once every three years by the Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, during the STATPHYS conference.
Journal of the Physical Society of Japan (JPSJ) is a monthly, peer-reviewed, scientific journal published by the Physical Society of Japan (JPS). It was first published in July 1946. The editor-in-chief was A. Kawabata until August 2010. The impact factor for JPSJ in 2017 is 1.485, according to Journal Citation Reports.
Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
Dame Athene Margaret Donald is a British physicist. She is Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Ludwik Leibler, born in 1952 is a Polish-born French physicist. He is Professor of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.
Physical Review E is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal, published monthly by the American Physical Society. The main field of interest is collective phenomena of many-body systems. It is currently edited by Uwe C. Täuber. While original research content requires subscription, editorials, news, and other non-research content is openly accessible.
Julia Mary Yeomans is a British theoretical physicist active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics. She has served as Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002.
Ramin Golestanian is a professor at the Department of Physics and the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. He is a fellow of St Cross College and is affiliated with the Oxford Centre for Soft and Biological Matter. In 2014 he was awarded the Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize for his "pioneering contributions to the field of active soft matter, particularly microscopic swimmers and active colloids". In 2017 he was awarded the Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Lecture Prize. Ramin Golestanian is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, heading the department of Living Matter Physics.
David Andelman, is an Israeli theoretical physicist best known for his contributions to soft matter and biophysics.
Nelamangala Vedavyasachar Madhusudana is an Indian physicist and an emeritus scientist at Raman Research Institute. Known for his research on liquid crystals, Madhusudhana is an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1989.
An active fluid is a densely packed soft material whose constituent elements can self-propel. Examples include dense suspensions of bacteria, microtubule networks or artificial swimmers. These materials come under the broad category of active matter and differ significantly in properties when compared to passive fluids, which can be described using Navier-Stokes equation. Even though systems describable as active fluids have been observed and investigated in different contexts for a long time, scientific interest in properties directly related to the activity has emerged only in the past two decades. These materials have been shown to exhibit a variety of different phases ranging from well ordered patterns to chaotic states. Recent experimental investigations have suggested that the various dynamical phases exhibited by active fluids may have important technological applications.
Maria Cristina Marchetti is an Italian-born, American theoretical physicist specializing in statistical physics and condensed matter physics. In 2019, she received the Leo P. Kadanoff Prize of the American Physical Society. She held the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professorship of Physics at Syracuse University, where she was the director of the Soft and Living Matter program, and chaired the department 2007–2010. She is currently Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mark John Bowick is a theoretical physicist in condensed matter theory and high energy physics. He is the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Physics in UCSB's Physics Department.
