KCS

Soft matter (including polymers, colloids, surfactants, and liquid crystals) is indispensable in our daily life and modern industry. For example, slime (so called 액체 괴물) is such a popular toy for school children that there are many YouTube channels. Cosmetic products are made mostly of gels and creams. Liquid crystals and photo-reactive polymers are important materials for producing displays and semiconductors. Soft matter is also a system of academic interest due to its unique character: soft matter may behave like either liquids or solids depending on the spatiotemporal scales. For example, polymer melts flow like liquids at long time scales but are still elastic like solids at short time scales. Such a unique character makes the multiscale nature and non-equilibrium dynamics of soft matter essential topics when trying to understand and design soft matter. Over the past decades, the computer simulations have proven to be a powerful tool to investigate soft matter at many spatiotemporal scales. In this talk, I would like to share the molecular simulation studies of my group to understand the non-equilibrium nature, the phase transition, and the reaction kinetics of various soft matter systems.