English

Composite topological objects in topological superfluids

Other Condensed Matter 2020-09-23 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Superfluid phases of 3^3He discovered in 1972 opened the new area of the application of topological methods to condensed matter systems. Due to the multi-component order parameter which characterizes the broken SO(3)×SO(3)×U(1)SO(3)\times SO(3)\times U(1) symmetry in these phases, there are many inhomogeneous objects -- textures and defects in the order parameter field -- which are protected by topology and are characterized by topological quantum numbers. Among them there are quantized vortices, skyrmions and merons, solitons and vortex sheets, monopoles and boojums, Alice strings, Kibble-Lazarides-Shafi walls terminated by Alice strings, spin vortices with soliton tails, etc. Most of them have been experimentally identified and investigated using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniquie, and in particular the phase coherent spin precession discovered in 1984 in 3^3He-B by Borovik-Romanov, Bunkov, Dmitriev and Mukharskiy in collaboration with Fomin.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.05962,
  title  = {Composite topological objects in topological superfluids},
  author = {G. E. Volovik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.05962},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

draft of the paper prepared for the issue of JETP devoted to 100 years of Borovik-Romanov, 9 pages, 11 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.02595

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:44:05.837Z