{"id":120156,"date":"2021-03-03T10:23:49","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T18:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/second-order-optical-merons-or-light-pretending-to-be-a-ferromagnet"},"modified":"2021-03-03T10:23:49","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T18:23:49","slug":"second-order-optical-merons-or-light-pretending-to-be-a-ferromagnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/second-order-optical-merons-or-light-pretending-to-be-a-ferromagnet","title":{"rendered":"Second Order Optical Merons, or Light Pretending to Be a Ferromagnet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/second-order-optical-merons-or-light-pretending-to-be-a-ferromagnet.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude03<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Scientists have demonstrated how to structure light such that its polarization behaves like a collective of spins in a ferromagnet forming half-skyrmions (also known as merons). To achieve this, the light was trapped in a thin liquid crystal layer between two nearly perfect mirrors. Skyrmions, in general, are found, e.g., as elementary excitations of magnetization in a two-dimensional ferromagnet but do not naturally appear in electromagnetic (light) fields.<\/p>\n<p>One of the key concepts in physics, and science overall, is the notion of a \u201cfield\u201d that can describe the spatial distribution of a physical quantity. For instance, a weather map shows the distributions of temperature and pressure (these are known as scalar fields), as well as the wind speed and direction (known as a vector field). Almost everyone wears a vector field on their head \u2014 every hair has an origin and an end, just like a vector. Over 100 years ago L.E.J. Brouwer proved the hairy ball theorem which states that you can\u2019t comb a hairy ball flat without creating whorls, whirls (vortices), or cowlicks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ud83d\ude03 Scientists have demonstrated how to structure light such that its polarization behaves like a collective of spins in a ferromagnet forming half-skyrmions (also known as merons). To achieve this, the light was trapped in a thin liquid crystal layer between two nearly perfect mirrors. Skyrmions, in general, are found, e.g., as elementary excitations of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}