Title: Emergent behaviors of self-organized, soft matter systems

Abstract

While reductionism, which operates on the idea that to understand the behavior of a complex system we need to break it down to its constituent parts and understand the physics that governs each of the parts, is an extremely powerful and necessary approach, in complex systems reductionism is not sufficient. New collective behaviors emerge as new structures and assemblies come together: emergent properties.

The progress and conclusions from two examples will be presented: dry polymer networks either with only covalent bonds, or with co-existing covalent and metal coordination bonds, and liquid-liquid phase separating systems. In particular, complex coacervates of oppositely-charged polyelectrolytes, as well as the phase separation of an intrinsically disordered protein.