Tying quantum knots
By D. Hall, M. Ray, K. Tiurev, E. Ruokokoski, A. Gheorghe, M. Mottonen. Nature Physics, 2015
163 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As topologically stable objects in field theories, knots have been put forward to explain various persistent phenomena in systems ranging from atoms and molecules to cosmic textures in the universe. Recent experiments have reported the observation of knots in different classical contexts. However, no experimental observation of knots has yet been reported in quantum matter. Here we demonstrate the experimental creation and detection of knot solitons in the order parameter of a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate. The observed texture corresponds to a topologically nontrivial element of the third homotopy group and exhibits the celebrated Hopf fibration, which unites many seemingly unrelated physical phenomena. Our work calls for future studies of the stability and dynamics knot solitons in the quantum regime. Knots have been observed in a variety of classical systems, but so far not in the quantum regime. Knot solitons have now been created in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate, exhibiting interesting topological structures, including Hopf fibration.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Geometry and Topology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ead0dbde35ef0237fbc146c05e7abced45b91e2
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Diversity of knot solitons in liquid crystals manifested by linking of preimages in torons and hopfions (2017, background): “s and demonstrations of topological solitons with knotted eld lines typically deal only with transient phenomena and out-of-equilibrium systems or are accompanied by observation of additional defects [3,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22] and their detailed explorations a”