Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize Talk: Aspects of Geometry, Topology and Order in Soft Matter Physics

In soft matter physics we have the advantage of designing the particles, dynamics and interactions for our studies and technologies. Ellipsoids are different from spheres, curved space leads to different order than flat space and shear can promote alignment, disorder or new forms of order. Examples will include, random packing of M&M’s^®, disclinations, fingerprints and nanolithography with diblock copolymers, pleats and particle fractionalization with colloids on curved surfaces and 2D freezing on the surface of a sphere. The quantification of order in these and less well understood systems can be addressed by their information content. The length of a losslessly compressed data set is a computable measure of this information as will be illustrated with both equilibrium and driven systems.