Soft condensed matter physics

[Astronuc]

Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a type of matter that can be deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress which is of similar magnitude to thermal fluctuations.

The science of soft matter is a subfield of condensed matter physics. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy (of order of kT), and that entropy is considered the dominant factor. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. When soft materials interact favorably with surfaces, they become squashed without an external compressive force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_matter

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.

I'm wondering how this applies to metal, or more particularly, to alloys with a homologous temperature of 0.8 or greater.

I discovered the subject matter when it was called to my attention.

ESPResSo++: A modern multiscale simulation package for soft matter systems​

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010465512004006. (subscription/purchase required, or access through one's institution)

Code modernization strategies for short-range non-bonded molecular dynamics simulations
https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10876