Welcome to the web page of Doug Durian's research group at UCLA! Our research interests are in the area of "soft" condensed matter physics: the structure and dynamics of a broad class of materials (such as foams, suspensions, biological tissue and granular media) that are noncrystalline but have structure much bigger than atomic scales. The general goal of our work is to determine how the macroscopic behaviour of these materials arises from this mesoscopic structure.
We take advantage of the fact that the mesoscopic structure of most forms of soft matter strongly scatters light to study opaque materials such as foams. From the intensity of transmitted light we obtain details of the structure, while from fluctuations in this intensity we monitor dynamics. As applied to foams, we can directly study the evolution of the dense random packing of gas bubbles which gives rise to the stability of the foam as well as its unusual mechanical properties, namely how they can support shear stress like a solid but also flow like a liquid. As applied to granular materials, these techniques give us a means of studying microscopic motions of grains from which we hope to build descriptions of the 'fluid mechanics' of these materials when they are agitated by external forces.
