Physicists from Finland and the United States have created and photographed an unusual quantum object, a kind of magnetic vortex, which is similar in appearance and properties to an ordinary ball lightning, according to an article published in the journal Science Advances.
“It is extremely surprising that we were able to create a synthetic electromagnetic node, quantum ball lightning, using only two oppositely directed flows of electric current. All this suggests that natural ball lightning of this type can also occur as a result of conventional lightning strikes,”says Mikko Möttönen from Aalto University in Helsinki (Finland).
Ball lightning are balls of incandescent plasma charged with electricity. They periodically appear in the atmosphere during thunderstorms and live much longer than ordinary lightning. How exactly they arise and what processes control their movement, scientists do not yet know and have been arguing about their nature for almost a century and a half.
Möttenen and his colleagues suggest that ball lightning is not only electrical, but also of a quantum nature, creating a complete analogue of this "mystery of nature", experimenting with the so-called skyrmions, special objects of the quantum world.
Skyrmions are special hypothetical particles of matter with unusual magnetic properties that make them look like a kind of "hedgehog" or microscopic vortex. The tips of the needles of such a “hedgehog” or the edge of a hurricane are positively charged, and the body of an “animal”, or the epicenter of a hurricane, is negatively charged.
Such quantum "hedgehogs", according to physicists, have extremely high stability, which allows them to be used as durable and economical memory cells for the spin and quantum computers of the future, as well as conventional computers of our time.
Scientists have not yet discovered or created "real" skyrmions, and their closest analogues are special two-dimensional structures inside thin films made of magnetic materials or special substances, such as manganese silicide. Such vortices arise in them by themselves under special conditions, for example, at temperatures close to absolute zero.
Diagram of a three-dimensional skyrmion, quantum quasiparticle / Lee et al. / Science Advances 2018.
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Finnish and American physicists have created a new version of these particles, which has a three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional nature, using another quantum substance - the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate.
It is an unusual form of matter in its properties, similar to gas and liquid, which behaves like one giant atom and has typical "atomic" properties. Typically, scientists get it by cooling a cloud of rubidium and other alkali metal atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero.
As Möttenen and his colleagues have found, this artificial atom can be turned into a three-dimensional analogue of a skyrmion by placing it inside a strong magnetic field and changing the position of the spin of each real atom inside it in a special way. When this field is "turned off", a special quantum structure appears inside the Bose-Einstein condensate, which has the same configuration of electromagnetic fields braided into a knot as ball lightning.
Its main unusual property, as the physicist notes, is that it exists in such a form for an unusually long time for a quantum object, several hundred microseconds. This, according to Möttenen, suggests that three-dimensional skyrmions can be the "core" of ball lightning, which also live unusually long compared to ordinary lightning discharges.
