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Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications, is enormous, and controlling or improving their properties is the focus of many efforts. From a fundamental perspective, the possibility of manipulating soft material properties, by tuning interactions between constituents and by applying external perturbations, gives rise to an almost unlimited variety in physical properties. Together with the relative ease to observe and characterise them, this renders soft matter systems powerful model systems to investigate statistical physics phenomena, many of them relevant as well to hard condensed matter systems. Understanding the emerging properties from mesoscale constituents still poses enormous challenges, which have stimulated a wealth of new experimental approaches, including the synthesis of new systems with, e.g. tailored self-assembling properties, or novel experimental techniques in imaging, scattering or rheology. Theoretical and numerical methods, and coarse-grained models, have become central to predict physical properties of soft materials, while computational approaches that also use machine learning tools are playing a progressively major role in many investigations. This Roadmap intends to give a broad overview of recent and possible future activities in the field of soft materials, with experts covering various developments and challenges in material synthesis and characterisation, instrumental, simulation and theoretical methods as well as general concepts. 

Abstract This review summarizes recent progress in investigating polymer systems by using Differential dynamic microscopy (DDM), a rapidly emerging approach that transforms a commercial microscope by combining real‐space information with the powerful capabilities of conventional light scattering analysis. DDM analysis of a single microscope movie gives access to the sample dynamics in a wide range of scattering wave‐vectors, enabling contemporary polymer science experiments that would be difficult or impossible with standard light scattering techniques. Examples of application include the characterization of polymer solutions and networks, of polymer based colloidal systems, of biopolymers, and of cellular motility in polymeric fluids. Further applications of DDM to a variety of polymer systems are suggested to be just behind the corner and it is thus likely that DDM will become a tool of choice of the modern experimental polymer scientists.