Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure
an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this …

The viscoplastic deformation (creep) of crystalline materials under constant stress involves
the motion of a large number of interacting dislocations 1 . Analytical methods and …

Under stress, many crystalline materials exhibit irreversible plastic deformation caused by
the motion of lattice dislocations. In plastically deformed microcrystals, internal dislocation …

Inhomogeneous materials, such as plaster or concrete, subjected to an external elastic
stress display sudden movements owing to the formation and propagation of microfractures. …

The physics of sliding friction is gaining impulse from nanoscale and mesoscale
experiments, simulations, and theoretical modeling. This Colloquium reviews some recent …

We study the dynamics of a ferromagnetic domain wall driven by an external magnetic field
through a disordered medium. The avalanchelike motion of the domain walls between …

Inflammation response of epithelial mucosa to chemo- radiotherapy cytotoxic effects leads
to mucositis, a painful side effect of antineoplastic treatments. About 40% of the patients …

Plasticity of cancer invasion and metastasis depends on the ability of cancer cells to switch
between collective and single-cell dissemination, controlled by cadherin-mediated cell–cell …

We present a pedagogical introduction to self-organized criticality (SOC), unraveling its
connections with nonequilibrium phase transitions. There are several paths from a conventional …

We discuss mean-field theories for self-organized criticality and the connection with the general
theory of branching processes. We point out that the nature of the self-organization is not …