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 …

A comprehensive review is presented of the physical behavior of yield stress materials in
soft condensed matter, which encompasses a broad range of materials from colloidal …

Many questions of fundamental interest in today's science can be formulated as inference
problems: some partial, or noisy, observations are performed over a set of variables and the …

Granular materials consist of macroscopic grains, interacting via contact forces, and
unaffected by thermal fluctuations. They are one of a class systems that undergo jamming, ie …

Thermodynamics is a science concerning the state of a system, whether it is stable,
metastable or unstable, when interacting with the surroundings. In this overview …

Cross phenomena, representing responses of a system to external stimuli, are ubiquitous
from quantum to macro scales. The Onsager theorem is often used to describe them, stating …

Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-
range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no …

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

The low-frequency vibrational and low-temperature thermal properties of amorphous solids
are markedly different from those of crystalline solids. This situation is counterintuitive …

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