Widespread concerns over the impact of human activity on the environment have resulted in
a desire to replace artificial functional materials with naturally derived alternatives. As such …

Modeling of heterogeneous materials and media is a problem of fundamental importance to
a wide class of phenomena and systems, ranging from condensed matter physics, soft …

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 …

Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbours
and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape …

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

Deep learning has been immensely successful at a variety of tasks, ranging from
classification to artificial intelligence. Learning corresponds to fitting training data, which is …

Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that
can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally responsive …

In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials
using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium …

Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millennia and their study has
produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle …

The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical
physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity …