软凝聚态物质：2025–2026 年度综述

An annual survey of the cond-mat.soft arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 132 papers and organised into 37 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.

Book framework (share of the year's output):

• Driven and Confined Soft Matter Systems (54.0%) — This subdirection investigates the effects of external driving forces and geometric confinement on the physical properties and self-organization of soft matter systems, including granular materials, colloidal solutions, and elastic sheets.
• Active Matter and Soft Material Dynamics (26.9%) — This subdirection focuses on the dynamic behavior of active particles and soft materials, exploring how molecular interactions, hydrodynamic effects, and mechanical properties govern their structural evolution and emergent dynamics.
• Liquid Crystal and Collective Pattern Formation (7.9%) — This subdirection examines the formation and stability of ordered patterns in liquid crystals and related systems, including the role of chirality, defects, and collective behavior in shaping their morphology.
• Complex Fluid Flow and Colloidal Transport (3.9%) — This subdirection addresses the transport phenomena and flow behavior of complex fluids and colloidal suspensions, with emphasis on hydrodynamic interactions, porous media effects, and chiral fluid dynamics.
• Glassy Dynamics and Viscoelastic Deformation (2.4%) — This subdirection explores the structural relaxation, yielding behavior, and viscoelastic properties of disordered solids and glasses, focusing on how temperature, strain, and time influence their mechanical response.
• Biological Soft Matter and Cellular Mechanics (1.9%) — This subdirection investigates the mechanical and physical properties of biological systems, including lipid membranes, cell tissues, and protein aggregates, and their role in cellular processes and functions.
• Phase Separation and Non-Equilibrium Transitions (1.2%) — This subdirection studies phase transitions and phase separation phenomena in mixtures and active systems, with particular attention to non-equilibrium pathways, coexisting phases, and microphase formation.
• Field-Controlled Interfacial and Morphological Phenomena (0.8%) — This subdirection examines how external fields, such as magnetic or electric fields, control interfacial transport, morphology evolution, and emergent structures in soft matter systems.
• Mechanisms of Soft Matter Deformation and Response (0.7%) — This subdirection addresses unresolved questions about the underlying mechanisms governing deformation, hysteresis, and recovery in soft materials, including biological fibers and origami-inspired structures.
• Thermodynamic and Information-Theoretic Soft Matter (0.3%) — This subdirection explores the thermodynamic foundations and information-theoretic aspects of soft matter systems, including free energy computations, energy extraction, and information transfer in active systems.
• Recent Experimental and Theoretical Advances (0.1%) — This subdirection highlights recent experimental and theoretical developments that combine previous findings to address specific cases in soft matter physics, such as persistent noise models and topological counting rules.

Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.