Soft materials include liquids, colloidal suspensions, polymers, gels,
liquid crystals, active matters, granular materials, biological materials
and so on. Many of them have complex heterogeneous structures with mesoscopic
length scales, leading to slow structural relaxations and high sensitivity
to external perturbation. Key examples include near-critical fluids with
enormous critical fluctuations and dense particle systems undergoing jamming
or vitrification. The field of soft matter covers a vast range of highly
interdisciplinary problems and its border is being expanded in various
directions by many people attacking their traditional and new problems.
In this workshop, we aim to bring together representatives of the different
branches of soft matter physics in an environment where ideas can be exchanged
and common ground may be found between those working on very different
systems. In this way we wish to generate new ideas and streams towards
deeper and wider understanding of the varied dynamics in soft matter.