Liquid Matter Comes to Barcelona: Abstracts for LMC 2027 Close on December 20
The Liquid Matter Conference is the European Physical Society's standing meeting on the liquid state, and it has run on a roughly three-year rhythm since Lyon in 1990 — Firenze, Norwich, Granada, Konstanz, Utrecht, Lund, Vienna, Lisbon, Ljubljana, a virtual edition in 2021, then Mainz in 2024. The thirteenth edition meets in Barcelona, Spain, from 4 to 9 July 2027, and the abstract deadline is Sunday, 20 December 2026.
Why this meeting, for this group
“Liquid matter” is a wider label than it sounds. The conference is organised by the Liquids Section of the EPS Condensed Matter Division, and over three decades its scope has grown outward from simple liquids into complex fluids, soft matter and active matter, taking in the physics, chemistry, biology and chemical engineering of each. The announced sessions for 2027 read like a map of this group's own interests:
- Ionic liquids, electrolytes and liquid metals
- Water, mixtures and complex solutions
- Liquid crystals and anisotropic fluids
- Polymers, polyelectrolytes and biopolymers
- Colloids, nanoparticles and self-assembly
- Interfaces, emulsions and foams
- Liquids in confinement, solid–liquid interfaces and wetting
- Supercooled liquids, glasses and amorphous materials
- Driven systems, active systems and rheology
- Biological fluids, biomolecular condensates and phase separation
- Liquid matter for energy, environment and sustainability
Four of those eleven sit directly on work we have written about here: colloidal self-assembly, emulsions and interfaces, confinement and wetting, and the driven/active/rheology session where magnetic and self-propelled suspensions live.
The format is plenary lectures, topical symposia with keynote and contributed talks, and poster sessions. The plenaries are streamed; all speakers are on site. For a graduate student, a contributed talk or poster at a European meeting of this size is a different audience from the US conference circuit, and the topical-symposium structure means a poster lands in front of people working on the same problem rather than in a general hall.
The dates that matter
- Abstract submission closes: Sunday, 20 December 2026
- Abstract notification: Monday, 1 March 2027
- Final programme announced: Wednesday, 31 March 2027
- Early-bird registration closes: Friday, 2 April 2027
- Registration closes: Sunday, 20 June 2027
- Conference: 4–9 July 2027
Two things follow from that ordering. First, the abstract deadline arrives before the semester ends, so the writing has to happen alongside finals rather than after them. Second, notification lands on 1 March and early-bird registration closes on 2 April — a four-week window, which is tight if travel funds need an approval chain. Anyone planning to go should open the funding question in parallel with the abstract, not after the acceptance.
What to do in the next eight weeks
- Pick the session before the title. The symposium structure means the session you target shapes how the abstract should be framed.
- Build the abstract around a single result with a number in it. A contributed-talk slot is decided on whether the committee can tell what you measured or computed.
- Check submission and registration details directly at lmc2027.com. Conference dates move; the ones above are as published at the time of writing.
- Start the travel-funding conversation now. July in Barcelona is peak season, and the gap between registration closing and the meeting leaves little room to improvise.
Group members who want to work out whether a piece of current work is ready for an abstract should raise it at a group meeting before the end of November. That leaves a few weeks of drafting before the deadline — and this is the second international deadline on our calendar this autumn, after the APS Global Physics Summit call that closes in October.
13th Liquid Matter Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 4–9 July 2027. Organised by the Liquids Section of the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society. Abstracts close 20 December 2026. lmc2027.com