Controlled creation of a singular spinor vortex by circumventing the Dirac belt trick.

ABSTRACT: Persistent topological defects and textures are particularly dramatic consequences of superfluidity. Among the most fascinating examples are the singular vortices arising from the rotational symmetry group SO(3), with surprising topological properties illustrated by Dirac's famous belt trick. Despite considerable interest, controlled preparation and detailed study of vortex lines with complex internal structure in fully three-dimensional spinor systems remains an outstanding experimental challenge. Here, we propose and implement a reproducible and controllable method for creating and detecting a singular SO(3) line vortex from the decay of a non-singular spin texture in a ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate. Our experiment explicitly demonstrates the SO(3) character and the uniqu

SUBMITTER: Weiss LS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6795882 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature