"[5][6] In 2014 he shared the Lars Onsager Prize with Vladimir Petrovich Mineev for "their contribution to a comprehensive classification of topological defects in condensed matter phases with broken symmetry, culminating in the prediction of half-quantum vortices in superfluid He-3 and related systems.
[12] Volovik collaborated with the experimentalist Yuri Mikhailovich Bunkov on the study of particle physics analogues and phenomena in helium-3.
His view of the emergence of gravitation as a collective vacuum excitation stands in Russia in the tradition of a theory by Andrei Sakharov.
[16] In 2007 he published a Fermi point scenario making the assumption that gravity is "an emergent low-energy phenomenon arising from a topologically stable defect in momentum space".
[18][19] In the first decade of the 21st century he served on the steering committee of the European Science Foundation's program Cosmology in the Laboratory (COSLAB).