This volume of the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Second Edition, focuses on current challenges in the field from materials and mechanics to applications of statistical and nonlinear physics in the life sciences. Challenges today are mostly in the realm of non-equilibrium systems, although certain equilibrium systems also present serious hurdles. Where possible, pairwise articles focus on a single topic, one from a theoretical perspective and the other from an experimental one, providing valuable insights. In other cases, theorists and experimentalists have collaborated on a single article. Coverage includes both quantum and classical systems, and emphasizes 1) mature fields that are not covered in the current specialist literature, (2) topics that fall through the cracks in disciplinary journals/books, or (3) developing areas where the knowledge base is large and robust and upon which future developments will depend. The result is an invaluable resource for condensed matter physicists, material scientists, engineers and life scientists.
About the Author: Bulbul Chakraborty is the Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University. She is recognized for her contributions to soft condensed matter theory studying systems far from equilibrium, such as granular materials, amorphous systems, and statistical physics. She is an elected American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow. She graduated with a BSc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1974 and earned a PhD in 1979 from State University of New York, Stony Brook. The title of her PhD thesis is "Influence of thermal disorder on electronic properties of solids". She was a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, NORDITA, Denmark, and a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Science; she was a Scientific Officer (equivalent of Assistant Professor) at the Materials Science Laboratory, Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research (1984-1986), and an Associate Research Physicist and Lecturer, in Applied Physics, at Yale University (1987-1989). Chakraborty joined the faculty in the Physics Department at Brandeis University in 1989, where she has been Full Professor since 2000. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of the jamming transition in amorphous materials. Her group uses statistical frameworks to investigate the properties of shear-jammed and densely packed particulate materials, finding that elasticity and friction are correlated with athermal fluctuations in many disordered systems. Bulbul Chakraborty was elected fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2008 "for important theoretical contributions to diverse areas of condensed matter physics, including frustrated magnets, diffusion of light particles in metals, the glass transition, and jamming in granular systems". In 2018, the Simons Foundation awarded Chakraborty a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. Chakraborty was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2020.