{"id":156020,"date":"2023-01-23T01:23:53","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T07:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/light-shaped-as-a-smoke-ring-behaves-like-a-particle"},"modified":"2023-01-23T01:23:53","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T07:23:53","slug":"light-shaped-as-a-smoke-ring-behaves-like-a-particle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/light-shaped-as-a-smoke-ring-behaves-like-a-particle","title":{"rendered":"Light Shaped as a Smoke Ring Behaves Like a Particle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-shaped-as-a-smoke-ring-behaves-like-a-particle2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Researchers report a new, highly unusual, structured-light family of 3D topological solitons, the photonic hopfions, where the topological textures and topological numbers can be freely and independently tuned.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We can frequently find in our daily lives a localized wave structure that maintains its shape upon propagation\u2014picture a smoke ring flying in the air. Similar stable structures have been studied in various research fields and can be found in magnets, nuclear systems, and particle physics. In contrast to a ring of smoke, they can be made resilient to perturbations. This is known in mathematics and physics as topological protection.<\/p>\n<p>A typical example is the nanoscale hurricane-like texture of a magnetic field in magnetic thin films, behaving as particles\u2014that is, not changing their shape\u2014called <a href=https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/skyrmions\/>skyrmions<\/a>. Similar doughnut-shaped (or toroidal) patterns in 3D space, visualizing complex spatial distributions of various properties of a wave, are called hopfions. Achieving such structures with light waves is very elusive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers report a new, highly unusual, structured-light family of 3D topological solitons, the photonic hopfions, where the topological textures and topological numbers can be freely and independently tuned. We can frequently find in our daily lives a localized wave structure that maintains its shape upon propagation\u2014picture a smoke ring flying in the air. Similar stable [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,2229,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-mathematics","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156020","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}