Condensed Matter Physics

All proposals submitted to this Program that are not governed by another solicitation (such as CAREER) must be submitted to the solicitation: Division of Materials Research: Topical Materials Research Programs (DMR:TMRP) (NSF 22-609). Proposals under this solicitation are accepted any time.

Proposers should be aware that there is no change expected in the average time to decision and release of reviews. Considering that NSF’s fiscal year begins on October 1^st and ends on September 30^th, proposals submitted between February and August are more likely to be awarded in the following fiscal year.

The Condensed Matter Physics program supports experimental, as well as combined experiment and theory projects investigating the fundamental physics behind phenomena exhibited by condensed matter systems.  Representative research areas in such systems include: 1) phenomena at the nano- to macro-scale including: transport, magnetic, and optical phenomena; classical and quantum phase transitions; localization; electronic, magnetic, and lattice structure or excitations; superconductivity; and nonlinear dynamics. 2) low-temperature physics: quantum fluids and solids; 1D & 2D electron systems. 3) physics of soft matter: partially ordered fluids, liquid crystals, gels, foams and emulsions, granular and colloid physics, rheology and jamming. 4) mesoscale systems and macromolecular assemblies: self-organization and active matter, physics of biological materials, intrinsically heterogeneous materials and complex interactions across different length scales, and 5) understanding the fundamental physics of new states of matter as well as the physical behavior of condensed matter under extreme conditions e.g., low temperatures, high pressures, and high magnetic fields.  Questions of current interest that span these research areas are:  How and why do complex macroscopic phenomena emerge from simple interacting microscopic constituents?  What are the rules and principles controlling collective motion, self-organization and self-assembly of matter? What new physics occurs far from equilibrium and how?  What is the physics behind the behavior of matter confined to the nanoscale in one or more dimensions?  What is the physics of spin systems and quantum states of matter that could lead to their coherent manipulation and control?