ABSTRACT
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The preceding chapters dealt with disordered collections of solid particles in the form of either granular materials or suspensions. Here instead we consider dispersions of a fluid-either a gas or a liquid-inside a liquid. When the dispersed phase is a gas, the resulting material is called a liquid foam; when both phases are liquids, the material is an emulsion. On the mesoscale, foams and emulsions can be viewed as packings of, respectively, gas bubbles or liquid droplets. Despite being composed entirely of fluids, they resist shear deformation elastically and are therefore solids. Our main goal here is to explore the structural and mechanical properties of this solid state, both on the microscopic and on the macroscopic scale.
