the sky. It can be considered an additional anomaly. Anomalies like physicists in particular. The sky theory was put forward in the early 1960s by Britain’s Tony Skyrim. Hence its name. What is it about? It is not a classical elementary particle. Rather, it is semi-particular. Understand, an object that helps researchers describe the particle systems of interest to them.

The Skyrmion theory was first developed in the early 1960s by Tony Skyrme. Hence its name. Skyrmion corresponds to the excitation of space formed by a vortex spinning on the surface of a material. So it’s often seen as some kind of two-dimensional thing. It was first observed only in 2009. In a crystal of silicon and manganese. And recently, in 2018, researchers succeeded in creating a three-dimensional sky in a quantum gas. The gas cools to nearly absolute zero from the rubidium atoms.

This is consistent with Tony Schermi’s theory of the sky as three-dimensional objects. It can help us unlock the secrets of “ball lightning” or tell us about the physics of exotic matter and cold atoms. And even about the origins of our universe. It also has applications in electronics, lower electronics, or even super-fast data storage. Physicists, for example, imagine that the sky could allow them to develop solid disks twenty times denser than they are today.

For several decades, these strange quasiparticles have been challenging physicists. Progress has been made in the search for a 2D sky. But even then, technical difficulties had limited observations of the three-dimensional sky. Until then, because today an international team of researchers has just shown how these physical objects can be measured in their three dimensions.

© Karin Everschor-Sitte, Matthias Sitte, Wikipedia, CC by-SA 3.0

Two-dimensional skies can appear in different forms: at the top, a “hedgehog” sky, at the bottom, a “spiral” sky.

The sky, semi-particle is still mysterious

What the researchers suggest is to use a simple beam of light as a kind of platform to model the sky. Because physicists today have a fairly good understanding of the properties of light. Polarized, for example. Its traces were first mentioned at the end of the seventeenth century.^NS century. When a mathematician notices that some of the images, seen through a crystal, appear to be duplicates. Even if he was rather nineteen^NS Century in which the explanation falls, researchers now know that polarization is the result of the distinct distribution of the direction of vibrations of the waves that make up the light.

What the physicists have chosen to do here is transform the polarization and phase – the instantaneous position of the wave in its cycle – of their light waves in terms of a sphere in four-dimensional space. To capture the idea developed by Tony Skyrme nearly 60 years ago. In other words, they created a light field in volume from a superposition of circularly polarized rays, one on the left and one on the right. Starting with amplitude and phase beams carefully modeled with a spatial light modulator (SLM), they obtained a field of Skyrmions after passing and recombining the beams in a polarized beam splitter (PBS) and a quarter-wave plate (QWP).

To measure the polarization state and phase of the beam, the researchers then relied on advanced techniques. The so-called full-field vector reconstruction (VFFR) is fed by polarimetry, interferometry and digital propagation measurements.

Finally, physicists were able to identify complex objects also from a geometric point of view in the sky. They look like a system of interlocking rings, which together form a particle-like structure. What is particularly interesting are the topological properties of the sky. They can indeed be deformed, stretched or compressed, but they will not separate. Moreover, this power is one of the characteristics that might be more interesting to exploit.