An international team of scientists has succeeded in makingknots with water in a laboratory, just a century after the idea was suggested. The feat, which has been published inNature Physics, paves the way for researchers to studythe twists and turnsthat happen in phenomena likethe ionized gases of the solar atmosphere, superconducting materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields described by elementary particles.
No less than 100 years ago, the scientist Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knots or “vortex rings” that bend into closed circuits and knotted around themselves, similar to the twists that form a tornado. Now, two physicists from the University of Chicago (USA), Dustin Kleckner and William Irvine, have managed to prove it in practiceusing a miniature version of an airplane wing created with a 3D printer.
According to the authors, during the flight of an airplane the wing induces a rotational or vortex movement of the air currents, which is what allows the aircraft to ascend. When a wing at rest suddenly accelerates, two vortices of air are created that circulate in opposite directions. Sdipping the miniature wing into a vat of waterand giving it a sudden acceleration, the researchers gotcreate a knot-shaped aquatic structure. To visualize it, they chose to inject small bubbles and then used a high-speed laser scanner capable of producing views of the fluid at 76,000 frames per second to reconstruct the 3D arrangement of the bubbles, thus revealing the formation of the knots. .
