Professor
Mike Cates
The research of Prof Cates is in the statistical mechanics of soft
condensed matter. This term refers
to colloids, polymers, emulsions, foams, surfactant solutions, powders, liquid crystals,
and similar materials. Domestic examples are (respectively) paint, engine oil,
mayonnaise, shaving cream, shampoo, talc, and the slimy mess that arises when a
bar of soap is left in contact with water. There are, of course, high-tech
examples of all of these; and many soft materials also play key roles in
biological processes.
Cates
is renowned for creating statistical mechanical models of these systems,
particularly in relation to their flow behaviour which can be dramatic. (An
instance is wet corn-starch which flows freely at small stresses but if pushed
hard, jams up.) This unusual flow behaviour stems from mesoscopic structure in
the material and is often related to the overall geometry of the constituents
(flexible chain molecules, colloidal hard spheres, etc.) rather than their
chemical microstructure. Such universality allows progress to be made with
simplified models that capture the essential physics without including all
chemical detail. These models can then be addressed either analytically, or by
simulation.
Mike Cates was appointed to the Chair of Natural
Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1995 (Natural Philosophy is an archaic term for what
we now call Physics). In 2004 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2007 he was
appointed to a Royal Society Research
Professorship, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in the UK, and
was made FRS in the same year. This
Professorship was renewed in 2012. In 2009 he received the Gold Medal of the British Society of Rheology. (Rheology is the
science of flow.) In 2013 he received the Weissenberg
Award of the European Society of Rheology. Since 2013 he has been an
Honorary Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge.
In March 2015 he was elected as the 19th Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at the University
of Cambridge. He will take up this position on 1 July 2015.
Recent
preprints (this link is an automated
search of the arXiv/cond-mat archive)
Email:
m.e.cates(at)ed.ac.uk