Many everyday soft materials (e.g. pastes, foams, muds, blood) have properties of both solids and liquids and can undergo a solid/liquid transition under an external applied perturbation. Such fluids are known as yield stress (or elasto-visco-plastic, EVP) materials and they exhibit diverse non-linear phenomena related to complex microstructural and particle network rearrangements that have implications for a wide range of industrial applications and natural processes. Consequently, there is great interest in improving the understanding EVP materials from a fundamental physics perspective and in developing strategies to predict and control their behavior. Although the field has grown substantially over recent years, the characterization of material dependent yielding properties still poses many open questions for experimental, numerical and theoretical researchers.

This mini-symposium will bring together world-leading researchers from the fields of engineering, rheology, applied mathematics and physics to review the current state-of-the-art in characterizing and understanding yield stress behavior in complex fluids, ranging from fundamental to applied perspectives. The mini-symposium will also provide a forum for the initiation of collaborations between researchers at OIST and leading experts from the wider scientific community. In fact, most significant contributions in the field have come from a combined effort from experiment-theory studies along with numerical simulations. These goals will be accomplished through 2.5 days of talks and informal discussions.

For more details visit the mini-symposium's website.