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Soft and frangible materials that remodel under flow can give rise to branched patterns shaped by material properties, boundary conditions, and the time scales of forcing. We present a general theoretical framework for emergent branching in…
Granular media such as sand and sugar are ubiquitous in nature and industry but are less well understood than fluids or solids. We consider the behavior of rapid granular flows where the transfer of momenta by collisions dominates. The…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
Jamming is a fundamental transition that governs the mechanical behavior of particulate media, including sand, foam and dense suspensions but also biological tissues: Upon compression, particulate media can change from freely flowing to a…
Models of planet formation are built on underlying physical processes. In order to make sense of the origin of the planets we must first understand the origin of their building blocks. This review comes in two parts. The first part presents…
Topological spin textures emerging in magnetic materials usually appear in crystalline states. A long-standing dilemma is whether we should understand these emergent crystals as gathering particles or coupling waves, the answer of which…
The ball lightning phenomenon is explained in the frame of a self-organization scenario suggested by experiments performed on the spontaneously generated complex spherical space charge configuration in plasma. Originated in a hot plasma,…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
How do topological defects affect the degree of order in active matter? To answer this question we investigate an agent-based model of self-propelled particles, which accounts for polar alignment and short-ranged repulsive interactions. For…
Topological phases of matter have sparked an immense amount of activity in recent decades. Topological materials are classified by topological invariants that act as a non-local order parameter for any symmetry and condition. As a result,…
Jamming is a ubiquitous phenomenon that appears in many soft matter systems, including granular materials, foams, colloidal suspensions, emulsions, polymers, and cells -- when jamming occurs, the system undergoes a transition from flow-like…
Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…
Drops deposited on rough and hydrophobic surfaces can stay suspended with gas pockets underneath the liquid, then showing very low hydrodynamic resistance. When this superhydrophobic state breaks down, the subsequent wetting process can…
The ability of soft matter such as drops and bubbles to change shape dynamically during interaction can give rise to counter-intuitive behaviour that may be expected of rigid materials. Here we show that dimple formation on approach and the…
All biological systems are subject to perturbations: due to thermal fluctuations, external environments, or mutations. Yet, while biological systems are composed of thousands of interacting components, recent high-throughput experiments…
Patterns forming spontaneously in extended, three-dimensional, dissipative systems are likely to excite several homogeneous soft modes ($\approx$ hydrodynamic modes) of the underlying physical system, much more than quasi one- and…
Volatility-dependent fractionation of the rock-forming elements at high temperatures is an early, widespread process during formation of the earliest solids in protoplanetary disks. Equilibrium condensation calculations allow prediction of…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…