Soft condensed matter

Soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter that studies materials that are easily deformed by thermal stresses or thermal fluctuations. These materials often possess structures which are much larger than atomic or molecular scales. The structure at the mesoscopic scales often determine macroscopic physical properties. Soft condensed matter is directly related to studies in biophysics. One possible roadblock to the development of biophysics as an established field is that soft condensed matter may be diverging into two distinct directions: a physical chemistry approach and a complex systems approach