Conclusions and Outlook - Towards Autonomous Soft Matter Systems - page 115

Chapter 8
Conclusions and Outlook
Non-equilibrium statistics and dynamics, especially in the context of active soft
matter, are very active fields of contemporary physics. Indeed, the direct and most
appealing motivation of such investigations is the promise of developing a physical
theory of living matter. Potential technological benefits include the possibility of
using the same principles to create artificial soft functional matter that can overcome
some of the limitations of present day technologies. A significant appeal of such
systems would be their capability to self-organize their form and function and the
ability to self-heal against destructive mechanisms. While the control of active sys-
tems from all their possible microscopic states remains an open challenge, it seems
feasible to construct artificial systems by providing a sufficiently strict pre-selection
of all possible configurations as we showed in Chap. 2 . We used soft functional
units, i.e., surfactant and lipid molecules, water and oil, constrained by micro-fluidic
channel networks and demonstrated that self assembled surfactant bilayer networks
in microfluidic channels may provide a crucial first step towards complex dynami-
cal functions comprising artificial nanoscale or molecular units. More specifically,
native surfactant bilayers already offer a range of different electrical behaviour that
can be exploited to create wet circuitry. The stability of these objects in micro-fluidic
systems is quite encouraging, both in static and in dynamic settings. The particu-
lar permeation properties of bilayer membranes for messenger molecules, such as
those occurring in systems of chemical oscillators (discussed inChap. 5 ) , furthermore
suggests the development of multi-functional, self-assembling dynamic nanoscale
systems which open up novel types of active soft matter technology, which is con-
ceptually influenced by the physical building principles of living matter, but relies
on simple components apt to synthesis and thorough control.
The construction of biomimetic systems from soft components, directly enables
one to test hypotheses about the many biological functions. As Richard Feynman
famously noted, “What I cannot create, I do not understand”, the construction of
artificial systems helps to gain a deep understanding about many natural phenomena.
In Chap. 3 , we used a simple reconstituted system, to study the fusion of membranes
in the context of neuronal signalling.We addressed the poorly understood phenomena