quantum vortices

In a ring accelerator, a beam of electrons circles millions of times. If the electrons are twisted like strands in a rope, their vortex motion should persist. But along the way, random jolts from imperfect magnets can disturb them. Scientists have described how vortex motion changes under such perturbations.

A stone falls into still water, and smooth rings spread across the surface. If the stone doesn't just fall but also spins, tiny whirlpools, vortices, appear on the surface. Light can do the same, only instead of water, it's space and time themselves.

After the Big Bang, according to inflationary cosmology, the Universe underwent rapid expansion and a series of phase transitions.

A blob of cold helium swoops dangerously close to a black hole. But this isn't just a blob: it's a dead star the size of Earth, yet with a mass comparable to the Sun's.

The paradox of the young solar wind has long puzzled heliophysicists. Measurements showed that near the Sun, proton beams aren’t smeared out but sharply compressed, as if someone had neatly hammered them into the shape of a hammerhead.

Imagine a spinning top the size of a city, weighing more than the Sun and making hundreds of revolutions per second. That's a neutron star — the remnant of an exploded star. Occasionally, its rotation suddenly speeds up, as if something inside has switched. Astronomers call these jumps glitches and suspect that invisible vortices in the star's superfluid interior are to blame.

A balloon doesn't deflate all at once: first, dents appear on its surface, which run, merge, and finally the balloon shrivels into a point. Domain walls behave in much the same way — thin partitions that divided space in the first moments after the Big Bang.

River water often swirls into funnels. But in semiconductors, the foundation of microchips, electrons at low temperatures and high purity also turn into a fluid. If you create a circular cavity, vortices appear, just like in a river backwater.

A magnetic field penetrates a superconductor not as a continuous flux but as thin filaments — vortices. Usually, they repel each other and arrange into a neat triangular lattice, like floats on water. But in CaSb₂, things went differently: vortices bunched into tight clusters, with almost empty space between them.

Inside a superconductor, a magnetic field typically twists into tubes, vortices, each carrying one quantum of magnetic flux. That's how the classic Abrikosov lattice works. But in LiFeAs crystals, the picture is different. Muon spectroscopy showed that the field penetrates not as individual vortices but as stripes. Each stripe contains pairs of 'coreless' vortices.

According to the Standard Model, the vacuum is not emptiness but an ocean of virtual ghost particles. An ultra-strong electromagnetic field, like a storm, yanks electron-positron pairs into reality.

A neutron star is a spinning top with the mass of the Sun, crushed to the size of a city. It's born in the fire of a supernova and usually only slows its spin. But sometimes, for no apparent reason, it suddenly speeds up — such a jerk is called a glitch.

In a tiny magnetic dot, smaller than a micron, lives a vortex — magnetization swirls like water in a drain. At the center of this swirl is a core that itself orbits in a small circle, like a spinning top that's been given a nudge.

In superfluid helium, a vortex is like a tornado in a bottle, but instead of water, it's a quantum liquid that flows without friction. Such a vortex doesn't dissipate on its own, so the question of where its energy goes has long remained open.

In the cold heart of a pure crystal, electrons flow like a viscous fluid — an idea predicted by Lev Landau. But the vortices of this fluid remained invisible, like a painting inferred from the noise of a crowd. Now scientists have created a nanostring: a semiconductor tuning fork with a circular cavity.

Liquid helium at ultra-low temperatures enters a state of superfluidity: it flows without friction, like a perfect lubricant.

A sudden gust hits a wing, and a huge vortex swirls above it. Such a vortex can abruptly change lift, making the plane's nose dip. Engineers have long sought ways to predict these vortices, but complexity gets in the way: fast airflow is full of small chaotic eddies.

In a container the size of a coin, light behaves like water: it gathers into a single quantum fluid. When energy is added, whirlpools, quantum vortices, spin up on their own. Each vortex is like a tiny whirlpool that cannot simply disappear. Physicists illuminated this fluid with a laser and took snapshots.

In a superconductor, electric current flows without loss, like water through a perfectly smooth pipe. But if you place such a material in a magnetic field, vortices appear inside — tiny whirlpools where superconductivity is destroyed. As long as these whirlpools stay put, current flows freely.

In the dense, star-forming gas cloud W44, the ALMA telescope has spotted eight tiny clumps racing at enormous speeds. In position–velocity maps, each one looks like the letter V, just like the previously discovered 'Bullet'. This resemblance hints at a common origin.

Vortons are invisible cosmic hoops, closed loops of curved spacetime. Thinner than an atom but heavier than stars, these Big Bang relics spin like giant carousels, churning everything around them. Einstein's equations describe how particles dance near such a hoop: paths twist into spirals or dart chaotically.

Dark matter is an invisible ocean that, as shown by observations by Vera Rubin, keeps stars in galaxies from flying apart. Physicists suspect that if dark matter consists of ultralight particles, in the cosmic cold it turns into a frictionless fluid — a so-called condensate.

A spinning black hole acts like a giant funnel, but instead of just sucking in everything around it, it twists space itself, like a swift river current. New calculations show that in this maelstrom, stable vortices can be born from ultralight particles — likely building blocks of dark matter.

When liquid is swirled in a cup, a vortex with an empty center forms. In this empty core, waves find a trap: bouncing off the walls, they siphon energy from the vortex and grow like a flame along a fuse — each wave stronger than the last, until a surge breaks loose. Astrophysicists have described the same chain reaction around black holes.

Superfluorescence is a crystal’s synchronized exhale of light. Researchers just witnessed its mirror image: superabsorption, a coordinated inhale. They zapped cheap perovskite nanocrystals with laser pulses (spectroscopy) and saw a time-reversed absorption burst.

Magnetic vortices in superconductors, like whirlpools in water, typically scatter energy and quickly vanish due to internal friction — dissipation. This hampers their use in quantum chips. But in a film of tiny aluminum grains, a vortex gets trapped and resembles a whirlpool in a narrow well: it spins either one way or the other.