No-one who took part in the NATO Advanced Studies Institute from which this book emerges will have forgotten the experience. True, the necessary conditions for a very successful workshop were satisfied: a field of physics bursting with new power and new puzzles, a matchless team of lecturers, an international gathering of students many of whom had themselves contributed at the forefront of their subject, an admirable overlap of experiment and theory, a good mix of experimenters and theorists, an enviable environment. But who could have foreseen the way the workshop became a focus for future directions, how fresh scientific ideas tumbled out of the discussion periods, how the context of teaching the field produced such fruitfulness of research at the highest level? The organisers did have some specific aims in mind. Perhaps foremost was the desire to compare notes among different areas within the sub field of soft condensed matter physics fast becoming known as "complex fluids". For readers seeking a definition, the prosaic "fluids with bits in" can be passed rapidly over in favour of the elegant discussion of slow variables by Scott Milner in his chapter. The uniting goals of the subject are to model the essential molecular or mesoscopic structure theoretically, and to probe this structure as well as the bulk response of the system experimentally. Our famous examples were: colloids, polymers, liquid crystals, block co-polymers and self-assembling surfactant systems.

Zusammenfassung
Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 24 March-4 April 1996

Inhalt
Experimental Challenges in Colloids.- Self-Diffusion of Colloids at Freezing.- Theoretical Challenges in Polymer Dynamics.- Slow Modes in Dynamic Light Scattering from Semi-Dilute Solutions of Polymeric and Polymer-Like Systems.- I. Relaxation of Concentration Fluctuations in Entangled Polymer Mixtures.- II. The Effect of Polymer Density Fluctuations on Dynamics of High Molecular-Weight Polymers.- Rheology of Entangled Polymers: Topological and Non-Linear Effects.- Shear-Enhanced Diffusion in Charge-Stabilised Colloids.- Effects of Shear Flow on Semidilute Polymer Solutions.- Rheology of Liquid Crystalline Polymers; Linear and Nonlinear Behaviour of the Nematic Phase.- The Shear-Flow Properties of Liquid Crystals.- Structural Properties of Wormlike Micelles.- Mechanical Properties of Biliquid Foams.- Effect of Flow on Lyotropic Phases.- Surfactant Cubic Phases.- Of Micelles and Many-Layered Vesicles.- Excess Dissipation in Dense Emulsions.- Dynamics of Domains and Textures.- Current Topics in Diffusion-Controlled Reactions of Polymers.