The general trend in soft matter is to study systems of increasing complexity which are more technologically and biologically relevant. This is facilitated by the capability of quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) to selectively probe spatially resolved dynamical modes at a molecular level. The large number of recent publications using QENS for investigating complex and multi-component soft matter systems, serves as recognition of the suitability of this technique by the scientific community. Exploiting its complementarity with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and other experimental techniques is the basis of a successful methodology for this scientific challenge. We illustrate the potential of QENS with three kinds of soft materials whose structural units increase in size/complexity: lipids, polymers and biomolecules.

We acknowledge support from the ‘Donostia International Physics Center’. A. A. acknowledges support from the European Commission NoE SoftComp, Contract NMP3-CT-2004-502235, the projects MAT2007-63681, IT-436-07 (GV) and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Grant No. CSD2006-53).

Peer reviewed