This is an extended version of my Nobel Lecture, delivered on December 8, 2021. I will
recall the genesis of the concept of multiple equilibria in natural sciences. I will then describe …

The physics of the glass transition and amorphous materials continues to attract the attention
of a wide research community after decades of effort. Supercooled liquids and glasses have …

Despite decades of theoretical studies, the nature of the glass transition remains elusive and
debated, while the existence of structural predictors of its dynamics is a major open …

Successful computer studies of glass-forming materials need to overcome both the natural
tendency to structural ordering and the dramatic increase of relaxation times at low …

Despite decades of work, gaining a first-principles understanding of amorphous materials
remains an extremely challenging problem. However, recent theoretical breakthroughs have …

Jamming is a ubiquitous phenomenon that appears in many soft matter systems, including
granular materials, foams, colloidal suspensions, emulsions, polymers, and cells—when …

Soft materials consist of basic units that are significantly larger than an atom but much
smaller than the overall dimensions of the sample. The label “soft condensed matter” …

Unlike a crystal, a glassy solid state displays slow internal relaxation processes besides
vibrational modes even when structural (α) relaxation is frozen. The precise nature of such …

Liquids relax extremely slowly on approaching the glass state. One explanation is that an
entropy crisis, because of the rarefaction of available states, makes it increasingly arduous …

Equilibrium sampling of the configuration space in disordered systems requires algorithms
that bypass the glassy slowing down of the physical dynamics. Irreversible Monte Carlo …