New research from the groups of Drs. Bostwick and Saylor is featured on the back cover of Soft Matter. Xingchen Shao, a PhD student, led the effort to shed new light on the motion of waves on the surface of ultra-soft gels. Such gels are widely used in bioprinting and tissue engineering applications and understanding the relevant physics are of broad scientific significance. The paper entitled “Extracting the surface tension of soft gels from elastocapillary wave behavior” describes the dynamics of mechanically-excited surface waves using experimental observations and theoretical modeling. In this paper, the authors show how their new technique can be used to measure surface tension in soft solids, allowing for a measurement capability that is sorely needed, but completely lacking.
