Professor Mike Cates
Prof
Cates’ research 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’ being 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. In 2009 he will receive the Gold
Medal of the British Society of Rheology.
(Rheology is the science of flow.)
Recent
preprints (this link is an automated
search of the arXiv/cond-mat archive)
Contact:
Prof M. E. Cates
School of Physics and
Astronomy
University of Edinburgh
James Clerk Maxwell Building
Kings Buildings Edinburgh
EH9 3JZ
Tel: + 44 (0)131 650 5296
Email: m.e.cates(at)ed.ac.uk