A foam is a space-filling cellular pattern, that can be decomposed into successive layers or strata. Each layer contains all cells at the same topological distance to an origin (cell, cluster of cells, or basal layer). The disorder of the underlying structure imposes a characteristic roughening...

The morphology diagram of ice crystal patterns, which grow freely in a supercooled water is obtained experimentally in a “supercooling-tip velocity” phase space. This diagram classifies eight nonequilibrium macroscopic structures growing in the supercooling temperature region of...

Surface instability in a thin liquid film engendered by a micro-scale wettability contrast, resulting from the spatial gradients in the intermolecular interactions, is investigated based on 3D simulations for a system displaying both the primary and secondary minima in its force vs. distance...

Colony morphology of wild and mutant strains of Aspergillus nidulans at various nutrient and agar levels was investigated. Two types of colony patterning were found for these strains. One type produced uniform colonies at all nutrient and agar levels tested, and the other exhibited morphological...

Several aspects of the theory of epitaxial crystal growth from atomic or molecular beams are developed from the perspective of statistical physics. Lectures are devoted to the rate equation theory of two-dimensional nucleation and its limitations; the growth of multilayer wedding cakes in the...

Observations of the peculiar behaviour of a drink of liqueur topped with cream led us to perform experiments showing that the instability is a convection phenomenon that arises through destabilizing surface-tension forces. The convection is solutal: driven by gradients of concentration of a...

Noise-induced absolute instability is demonstrated in computer experiments with a one-dimensional reaction–diffusion system. This phenomenon may occur in spatially extended flow systems of different nature, when the parameters are chosen close to the point of transition from convective to...

After a brief introduction we review the nonperturbative weak noise approach to the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) equation in one dimension. We argue that the strong coupling aspects of the KPZ equation are related to the existence of localized propagating domain walls or solitons representing...