軟質(zhì)或軟凝聚物是凝聚物的一個子領(lǐng)域，包含各種物理系統(tǒng)，這些物理系統(tǒng)由于熱波動幅度的熱應(yīng)力或機械應(yīng)力而變形或結(jié)構(gòu)改變。它們包括液體、膠體、聚合物、泡沫、凝膠、顆粒材料、液晶和許多生物材料。這些材料具有一個重要的共同特征，即主要的物理行為發(fā)生在與室溫?zé)崮芟喈?dāng)?shù)哪芰砍叨壬稀Ｔ谶@些溫度下，量子方面通常并不重要。Pierre Gilles de Gennes被稱為“軟物質(zhì)的奠基人”，在1991年獲得諾貝爾物理學(xué)獎，因為他發(fā)現(xiàn)研究簡單系統(tǒng)中有序現(xiàn)象的方法可以推廣到軟物質(zhì)中更復(fù)雜的情況，特別是液晶和聚合物的行為。

Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. They include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, and a number of biological materials. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to the more complex cases found in soft matter, in particular, to the behaviors of liquid crystals and polymers.