The idea that glasses can become marginally stable at a Gardner transition has attracted significant interest among the glass community. Yet, the situation is confusing: even at the theoretical level, renormalization group approaches provide contradictory results on whether the transition can exist in three dimensions. The Gardner transition was searched in only two experimental studies and few specific numerical models. These works lead to different conclusions for the existence of the transition, resulting in a poor understanding of the conditions under which a marginally stable phase can be observed. The very relevance of the Gardner transition for experimental glasses is at stake.

We study analytically and numerically the Weeks-Chandler-Andersen model. By changing external parameters, we continuously explore the phase diagram and regimes relevant to granular, colloidal, and molecular glasses. We revisit previous numerical studies and confirm their conclusions. We reconcile previous results and rationalise under which conditions a Gardner phase can be observed. We find that systems in the vicinity of a jamming transition possess a Gardner phase. Our findings confirm the relevance of a Gardner transition for colloidal and granular glasses, and encourage future experimental work in this direction. For molecular glasses, we find that no Gardner phase is present, but our studies reveal instead the presence of localised excitations presumably relevant for mechanical and vibrational properties of glasses.

Understanding the self-organization principles and collective dynamics of non-equilibrium matter remains a major challenge despite considerable progress over the last decade. In this talk, I will introduce a hydrodynamic analog system that allows us to investigate simultaneously the wave-mediated self-propulsion and interactions of effective spin degrees of freedom in inertial and rotating frames. Millimetric liquid droplets can walk across the surface of a vibrating fluid bath, self-propelled through a resonant interaction with their own guiding wave fields. A walking droplet, or `walker, may be trapped by a submerged circular well at the bottom of the fluid bath, leading to a clockwise or counter-clockwise angular motion centered at the well. When a collection of such wells is arranged in a 1D or 2D lattice geometry, a thin fluid layer between wells enables wave-mediated interactions between neighboring walkers. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, we demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of coherent droplet rotation dynamics for different types of lattices. For sufficiently strong pair-coupling, wave interactions between neighboring droplets may induce local spin flips leading to ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic order. Transitions between these two forms of order can be controlled by tuning the lattice parameters or by imposing a Coriolis force mimicking an external magnetic field. More generally, our results reveal a number of surprising parallels between the collective spin dynamics of wave-driven droplets and known phases of classical condensed matter systems. This suggests that our hydrodynamic analog system can be used to explore universal aspects of active matter and wave-mediated particle interactions, including spin-wave propagation and topologically protected dynamics far from equilibrium.

The fields of evolution and population genetics are undergoing a renaissance, due to the abundance of sequencing data. On the other hand, the existing theories are often unable to explain the experimental findings. It is not clear what sets the time scales of evolution, whether for antibiotic resistance, an emergence of new animal species, or the diversification of life. The emerging picture of genetic evolution is that of a strongly interacting stochastic system with large numbers of components far from equilibrium. In this talk, I plan to focus on the clone competition and discuss the diversity of a random population that undergoes selection and recombination (sexual reproduction). Recombination reshuffles genetic material while selection amplifies the fittest genotypes. If recombination is more rapid than selection, a population consists of a diverse mixture of many genotypes, as is observed in many populations. In the opposite regime, selection can amplify individual genotypes into large clones, and the population reaches the so-called "clonal condensation". I hope to convince you that our work provides a qualitative explanation of clonal condensation. I will point out the similarity between clonal condensation and the freezing transition in the Random Energy Model of spin glasses. I will conclude with a summary of our present understanding of the clonal condensation phenomena and describe future directions and connections to statistical physics.

Alternans, a beat-to-beat temporal alternation in the sequence of heart beats, is a known precursor of the development of cardiac fibrillation, leading to sudden cardiac death. The equally important precursor of cardiac arrhythmias is the rotating spiral wave of electro-mechanical activity, or reentry, on the heart tissue. In this talk, I will show that these two seemingly different phenomena can have a remarkable relationship: In well controlled in-vitro tissue cultures, isotropic populations of rat ventricular myocytes sustaining a temporal rhythm of alternans can support period-2 oscillatory re-entries, and vice versa. These re-entries bear `line defects' across which the phase of local excitation slips rather abruptly by $2\pi$, when a full period-2 cycle of alternans completes in $4\pi$. In other words, the cells belonging to the line defects are period-1 oscillatory whereas all the others in the bulk medium are period-2 oscillatory. We also find that a slowly rotating line defect results in a quasi-periodic like oscillation in the bulk medium. Some key features of these phenomena can be well reproduced in computer simulations of a nonlinear reaction-diffusion model.

Cells exist in a complex mechanical environment that is both a source of applied forces and a means of mechanical support. An incomplete understanding of the mechanisms cells use to detect mechanical stimuli, a process termed mechanotransduction, is currently preventing advances in tissue engineering and hindering the understanding of several mechanosensitive disease states. Mechanical stimuli are sensed at focal adhesions (FAs), complex dynamic structures comprised of several hundred types of proteins that mediate physical connections between the extracellular matrix and the cytoskeleton. Detection of mechanical cues is thought to be mediated by mechanically-induced changes in protein structure, which, in elegant in vitro single molecule experiments, have been shown to induce new biochemical functions, such as changes in binding affinity as well as the formation of distinct protein-protein interactions. However, the existence and role of these mechanically-induced changes in protein function in living cells are not well understood. To enable the visualization of protein loading, we create Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET)-based tension sensors that emit different colors of light in response to applied forces. The next step in the development of this technology is the use of these sensors to study the effects of mechanical loading on protein functions in living cells. To begin this process, we have refined two commonly used and powerful approaches, Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) and fluorescence co-localization to be compatible with FRET-based tension sensors. Initial efforts have focused on the mechanical linker protein vinculin due to its established role in regulating the response of FAs to mechanical loading. These novel techniques reveal that force affects both vinculin turnover as well as its ability to form distinct protein-protein interactions. Further use of these techniques should enable a wide variety of studies in mechanobiology involving different load-bearing proteins, subcellular structures, extracellular contexts, and cellular functions.

For many biological systems, the timescale at which ecological interactions occur is much shorter than the timescale at which evolutionary changes occur. For rapidly evolving pathogens such as influenza, however, this is not the case; influenza researchers therefore need to understand both the ecological interactions between the host and the pathogen and the virus?s evolutionary changes in order to ultimately control the disease in humans. Recently, a study looking at the evolutionary patterns of influenza showed that, while the virus?s genetic evolution occurred gradually, its antigenic evolution occurred in a punctuated manner. (Genetic evolution refers to how the virus?s nucleotides change over time; antigenic evolution refers to how the virus changes over time with respect to how our immune system recognizes it.) Previous research from our group hypothesized that these differences in evolutionary patterns could be explained by the presence of /neutral networks/ in the virus?s genotype space: networks of sequences that differ genetically from one another but fold into the same protein conformation and thereby share antigenic properties. Here, I will present a simple epidemiological model that implicitly incorporates these neutral networks. I show that this model can reproduce (1) the seasonal and interannual outbreak patterns of influenza, (2) the quantitative patterns of influenza?s antigenic evolution, and (3) the patterns of the virus?s genetic evolution, including its characteristic phylogenetic tree. I end with how this model may be useful in understanding patterns of viral diversity in other host species (e.g., avian and equine hosts).

Granular materials exist all around us, from avalanches in nature to the mixing of pharmaceuticals, yet the behavior of these ``fluids'' is poorly understood. Their flow can be characterized by the continuous forming and breaking of a strong force network resisting flow. This jamming/unjamming behavior is typical of a variety of systems, including granular flows, and is influenced by factors such as grain packing fraction, applied shear stress, and the random kinetic energy of the particles. I'll present experiments on quasi-static shear and free-surface granular flows under the influence of external vibrations. By using photoelastic grains, we are able to measure both particle trajectories and the local force network in these 2D flows. We find through particle tracking that dense granular flow is composed of comparable contributions from the mean flow, affine, and non-affine deformations. During shear, sufficient external vibration weakens the strong force network and reduces the amount of flow driven by sidewalls. In a rotating drum geometry, large vibrations induce failure as might be expected, while small vibration leads to strengthening of the pile. The avalanching behavior is also strongly history dependent, as evident when the rotating drum is driven in an oscillatory motion, and we find that sufficient vibration erases the memory of the pile. These results point to the central role of the mobilization of friction in quasi-static granular flow.

A certain 2D lattice model with nearest and next-nearest neighbor interactions is known to have a nonperiodic ground state. We show that during a slow quench from the high temperature, disordered phase, the ground state emerges through an infinite sequence of phase transitions. We define appropriate order parameters and show that the transitions are related by renormalizations of the temperature scale. As the temperature is decreased, sublattices with increasingly large lattice constants become ordered. A rapid quench results in glass-like state due to kinetic barriers created by simultaneous freezing on sublattices with different lattice constants.