Welcome to the second annual meeting of the GDR SoPhy: Soft Physics for Hard Materials.

The meeting will take place at the Jussieu campus in Paris on December 11 and 12. The meeting will begin at 10AM on the 11th, and end after lunch at 2PM on the 12th.

Among the topics relevant to the GDR SoPhy, we will address the following ones:

• Synthesis and characterization of building blocks for the synthesis of soft solids serving as soft precursors
• Control of the spatial organization of elementary building blocks and/or self-assembly
• Use of external fields to texture soft solids - memory effects
• Transformation of a soft solid into a hard material: analysis of the properties inherited from the soft precursor

Invited speakers and lecturers

Aurélie Hourlier-Fargette, Institut Charles Sadron et CNRS Univ. Strasbourg

"Architected polymeric foams generated from liquid templates"

Marie Albéric, Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris

"From amorphous calcium carbonate precursors to mineralized biological materials:

the case study of sea urchin biominerals"

The deadline for registration is November 15. For organizational reasons, the deadline will not be pushed at the last minute ! Please register as soon as possible if you're planning to join us. Thank you!

The 2024 SoPhy days are just around the corner ! Here is the final and exciting program (Final program), we hope you will enjoy every minute of it!

⚠️ Instructions for the speakers ⚠️: with the GDR SoPhy, we are trying to bridge (very) different communities, from soft matter squishy physicists to hard-core ceramicists and more. If you check out the program, you will see that it is a very multidisciplinary meeting. Unlike your usual conference, most people will not be familiar at all with neither your topic nor your domain. To maximize the benefits of the meeting and make sure that everyone learn something new, please make sure that you spend more time than usual introducing your talk, the domain, the challenges and the main concepts. Do not assume that people will know the fundamentals of your specific domain. If you present results from a specific technique, throw in an additional slide or two explaining the basics of how it works and what we can typically learn from it.

During the meeting, there will be a slot for discussing future actions of the GDR. If you have ideas about a specific topic that you would like to address, think about it and share it with us then (and/or email us before). For example, we organized three sucessfull 1-day topical meetings this year (additive manufacturing and rheology, drying, and a tandem SoPhy/ISM day coming soon). The GDR can help organize the meeting and provide (some) funding support.