Preface

An international conference on `Scattering Studies of Mesoscopic Scale Structure and Dynamics in Soft Matter' was held in Messina, Italy on 22-25 November 2000, organized by Francesco Mallamce and Sow-Hsin Chen. The theme of the conference was selected to correlate with the past and present research activities of one of the organizers (SHC), who has worked extensively on the structure and dynamics aspects of complex fluids and soft matter using light, x-ray and neutron scattering techniques. The conference turned out to be a success, owing largely to the high quality of the invited lectures. It has therefore been a pleasure to ask a number of the invited speakers to contribute feature articles describing their latest research results. We are grateful for these wonderful friends who took time out of their busy schedules to prepare for this special volume of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter articles which summarize some of their scientific views and exciting discoveries.

Under a general heading: `Topics on Scattering Studies of Structure and Dynamics in Complex Fluids', we assemble in this volume the following eight feature articles:

(1) Antonio Coniglio, Percolation and critical points (2) G Gompper, D Richter and R Strey, Amphiphilic bloch copolymers in oil-water-surfactant mixtures: efficiency boosting, structure, phase behaviour and mechanism (3) C Varea and A Robledo, Theory of interfacial bending constants (4) M Nonomura and T Ohta, Kinetics of morphological transitions between mesophases (5) K A Dawson, G Foffi, F Sciortino, P Tartaglia and E Zaccarelli, Mode-coupling theory of colloids with short-range attractions (6) F Sciortino and P Tartaglia, Aging in simple liquids: a numerical study (7) G Ruocco and F Sette, High frequency vibrational dynamics in glasses (8) M C Bellissent-Funel, Structure of confined water

The subject matter of these articles include: (1) a theoretical explanation of the co-existing critical and percolation phenomena in colloidal systems with short-range (compared with their typical dimensions) attractive interactions, written by an expert who pioneered the theoretical explanation of the phenomena; (2) the elucidation of the physics behind the recent discovery of a tremendous emulsification efficiency boosting in non-ionic microemulsions by addition of small amounts of di-block copolymers, written by a group of experts which made the discovery; (3) a concise summary of the density functional theory for the interfacial bending constants, the fundamental phenomenological constants which enter into the effective Hamiltonian description of complex liquids, by two veterans of the subject; (4) a description of the theory and simulations of a fascinating class of morphological transitions between micro-phase separated meso-structures in complex fluids, by an author (T Ohta) who pioneered the theory for such transitions; (5) a summary of the recent achievements, in terms of the mode-coupling theory, by the same group of physicists, on elucidation of the fascinating phenomenon of the formation of an `attractive glass' and the possibility of a `glass-to-glass' transition, exhibited by colloidal systems with short-range attractions; (6) a concise summary of their recent extensive MD works on `aging' phenomenon in quenched non-equilibrium systems; (7) an authoritative review of the recent results of investigations of molecular-scale wave length collective dynamics in glass forming systems made possible by the development of a high-resolution inelastic x-ray scattering method. This powerful spectroscopic method was developed originally by the authors of the paper; (8) a concise summary of the known molecular-scale hydrogen-bonded structures of confined water near hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces by an author who is the foremost expert in experimental investigations of these types of structures using neutron and x-ray diffraction techniques.

This special issue is edited jointly by Sow-Hsin Chen and Marie-Claire Bellissent-Funel and each article was refereed. We would like to thank the Publisher, Dr Richard Palmer for his cooperation and patience throughout the lengthy editing and production period of this special issue.