Spin, Orbital, Weyl and Other Glasses in Topological Superfluids

G. E. Volovik, J. Rysti, J. T. Mäkinen, V. B. Eltsov*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

14 Citations (Scopus)
187 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

One of the most spectacular discoveries made in superfluid 3He confined in a nanostructured material like aerogel or nafen was the observation of the destruction of the long-range orientational order by a weak random anisotropy. The quenched random anisotropy provided by the confining material strands produces several different glass states resolved in NMR experiments in the chiral superfluid 3He-A and in the time-reversal-invariant polar phase. The smooth textures of spin and orbital order parameters in these glasses can be characterized in terms of the randomly distributed topological charges, which describe skyrmions, spin vortices and hopfions. In addition, in these skyrmion glasses the momentum-space topological invariants are randomly distributed in space. The Chern mosaic, Weyl glass, torsion glass and other exotic topological states are examples of close connections between the real-space and momentum-space topologies in superfluid 3He phases in aerogel.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages20
JournalJournal of Low Temperature Physics
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Dec 2018
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Keywords

  • Chern mosaic
  • Disorder
  • Glass
  • Half-quantum vortex
  • Hedgehog
  • Hopfion
  • Larkin–Imry–Ma effect
  • Skyrmion
  • Superfluid He
  • Topological matter

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