Soft Matter (Nobel Lecture)

Abstract

Polymers, tensides, liquid crystals, and colloids have always stood at the forefront of Pierre‐Gilles de Gennes's interests. He obtained the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1991, and his Nobel lecture is a “sentimental journey in the wonderland of soft matter”, which is what he calls complex fluids. In his contribution, de Gennes laid more emphasis on the description of experiments than on theory. Thus he devotes one section to the techniques for making “Janus grains” from hollow glass particles; these grains are microparticles with a polar and an apolar side and have interesting properties for potential applications.