Speaker
Description
Humans have a natural instinct to characterize objects and sort them into categories. Topology builds on this idea in a particularly unusual way: everyday objects can be classified according to properties that survive continuous deformation. A coffee mug and a doughnut, for example, are topologically equivalent because each has one hole.
Similar ideas have become remarkably powerful in physics. Two-dimensional whirls known as skyrmions have been discovered in a wide range of materials and are now among the best-known examples of topological structures in condensed matter in particular in magnetism.
In three dimensions, vector fields can be even more twisted contain knots and braids. However, it becomes difficult to visualize such fields directly, yet topology allows us to classify them through their global structure.
In this talk, I will show how we can understand magnetic textures by asking whether their underlying field structures contain hidden braids, knots, or links—revealing the beautiful textures nature creates.
