Impact of Dynamics in Soft Matter on Macroscopic Response

Soft materials are ubiquitous in nature and technical applications. From cell membranes to car tires, the morphology at the nanoscale and the dynamics at the time-scale from picoseconds to microseconds links to the properties of the material at the larger length-scale. Many techniques record the relaxation time over a certain window that can capture more than 10 orders of magnitude. However, often the structure is the key to understand dynamics more in detail, especially if certain correlations exist. To identify relationships neutron spectroscopy is particularly useful, due to is ability to measure a dynamic correlation function with a very high spatial resolution.

Small-angle neutron-scattering and neutron spin echo spectroscopy are very powerful tools to explore the morphology and dynamics, respectively. The talk discusses those experimental results that can be obtained and how the information and the high spatial resolution can be utilized to deepen the understanding of other experimental techniques.