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Polymer physics connects the conformations and motion of long molecules to the properties of a material. A polymer can change shape through many segment rotations while its chemical backbone remains intact. This makes the competition between flow and relaxation important: the same chain can behave as a coil in one experiment and an extended object in another. Soft matter includes both these flexible structures and liquid crystals, whose orientational order produces a different route to strong mechanical and optical response.

Soft matter studies materials whose large-scale structures respond strongly to modest mechanical or thermal disturbances, including polymers, liquid crystals and colloids. Polymer physics connects chain conformations to material response; the coil-stretch transition is one example.

Soft matter physics studies the physical behaviour of soft matter, including its response to mechanical and thermal perturbations.