Soft
condensed matter systems are ubiquitous in nature. Their softness is reflected in a rich
spectrum of phenomena, such as self-assembly of amphiphiles in
solution, micro-phase separation of block copolymers, liquid
crystallinity, visco-elasticity of polymeric solutions and melts, etc.
With these unique properties these systems have already found diverse
industrial applications ranging from pharmaceuticals to advanced
materials and show much promise in the future. Moreover, many phenomena
exhibited by the classical soft matter systems apparently hold answers
to questions concerned with the structure and dynamics of biological
systems. I believe in the idea that even though most
biological functions definitely rely on a very specific biochemistry, there is a multitude
of universal physical
phenomena that provide the basis to this diverse functionality and can
be described by generic
models. In spite of the importance of this field, we are still lacking even basic understanding of many aspects of the underlying mechanisms. The difficulty can be directly linked to the fact that the soft degrees of freedom associated with these phenomena have characteristic length and time scales ranging from the molecular to mesoscopic to macroscopic. Another complicating feature is that these systems can be relatively easily brought out of the equilibrium and/or get trapped in numerous long living metastable states.
In my research I
apply a range of different approaches (field theory,
scaling, phenomenological and coarse-grained modeling) to address
the problems related to equilibrium strongly fluctuating systems (e.g.,
polymer solutions), out-of-equilibrium systems (bilayer membrane
fusion), systems trapped in long living metastable states (defects in
self-assembled structures, micelles), the effect of confinement on
self-assembly (nano-patterning, novel structures), and mechanical
properties of micro-phase separated polymeric systems (linear and
non-linear response to strain, viscoelasticity and its coupling to the
structure).