{"id":217174,"date":"2025-07-04T06:13:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T11:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/unveiling-hedgehog-topological-defects-in-three-dimensional-glasses"},"modified":"2025-07-04T06:13:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T11:13:03","slug":"unveiling-hedgehog-topological-defects-in-three-dimensional-glasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/unveiling-hedgehog-topological-defects-in-three-dimensional-glasses","title":{"rendered":"Unveiling hedgehog topological defects in three dimensional glasses"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been fascinated by how materials break down, especially glasses and polymers that don\u2019t have a regular crystal structure. Unlike crystals, where we understand plasticity through things like dislocations, amorphous materials like glasses are messier. There\u2019s no neat lattice to analyze, so figuring out where and how they deform under stress is a big open question.<\/p>\n

In two dimensions, researchers, including my research group and myself, have started using a topological approach\u2014looking at vortex-like patterns in how atoms move or vibrate\u2014to identify weak spots in glasses. This also included slicing 3D glasses to find topological defects<\/a> in the two-dimensional slices. That got me wondering: Could we do something similar in three dimensions, and, crucially, without having to slice the glass<\/a> into 2D layers?<\/p>\n

In this work published<\/a> in Nature Communications<\/i>, together with my postdoc Dr. Arabinda Bera, who performed the analysis, and with my longtime collaborator Prof. Matteo Baggioli, we show that we can. We use a kind of topological defect called a hedgehog, which is a point-like distortion in a vector field\u2014like when tiny arrows in space all point outward or inward, just like the spines of a hedgehog. These kinds of defects are well-known in soft matter physics, particularly in liquid crystals, but we hadn\u2019t seen them applied to 3D amorphous solids before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve always been fascinated by how materials break down, especially glasses and polymers that don\u2019t have a regular crystal structure. Unlike crystals, where we understand plasticity through things like dislocations, amorphous materials like glasses are messier. There\u2019s no neat lattice to analyze, so figuring out where and how they deform under stress is a big [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217174","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=217174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}