Quantum Systems

Physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto is an avid knitter and has been since taking up the hobby as a child. During graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, Matsumoto came across an unusually knotty stitch while knitting a pattern for a Japanese red dragon. “I have books with thousands of different stitch patterns, but the one in the red dragon wall hanging was one I had never seen,” she says. That got her thinking about the geometry of stitches and, eventually, led her to study the mathematics of knitting.

Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at Georgia Tech, is embarking on a five-year project to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of knitting.

Most waves lose their shape as they travel, but solitons defy that behavior. These self-reinforcing waves are ubiquitous in natural and artificial environments such as rivers, optical fibers, and even Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs; see Synopsis: Solitons of All Speeds). Now, two teams of researchers have independently created magnetic solitons in a BEC made from atoms with different spins. The experiments establish a new playground for further exploration of quantum solitons.