Nanometric "hedgehogs of light" that pave the way for new applications in information processing, transmission and storage

 The system developed at the Technion is expected to lead to the discovery of a variety of new optical phenomena

Researchers at the Technion succeeded in producing tiny "hedgehogs of light" called optical skyrmions, which hold the potential for a breakthrough in information processing, transmission and storage. The research, which was published in the prestigious journal Science, was led by Prof. Guy Bartel from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Viterbi and Prof. Nathaniel Lindner from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion. Prof. Bergin Jiunai from the Faculty of Medicine at the Albanian University in Tirana and the students Shai Tsass, Yevgeni Ostrovsky and Kobi Cohen participated in the study.

The term "skyrmion" is based on the name of the British physicist Dr. Tony Skyrme, who in 1962 devised a method for increasing the stability of high-energy physical systems, using tiny fields with a "hedgehog" spatial configuration. Over the years, this idea has also been realized with magnetic and other materials, and today the skyrmions are considered a great promise - partly in increasing the storage volume of computer memories.

Today, most of the information in the world is stored on hard drives, which are read from by a mechanical arm. Information management using skyrmions, on the other hand, is based on non-mechanical movement of the skyrmions using weak electric currents. Another feature of the skyrmions is their tiny size - they are 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair. These characteristics are expected to dramatically optimize, speed up and reduce information processing, transfer and storage processes.

Technion researchers are the first to expand Dr. Skiram's idea to the field of optics; They were able to create skyrmions using the electric field of electromagnetic waves moving through special materials. Unlike "normal" light waves, whose electric field is usually oriented in a specific direction (a physical principle on which, for example, polarizing sunglasses are based), the Technion researchers showed that the electric field can take on the "skyrmion" shape and address all the Hebrews at the same time so that its shape The space resembles the spines of a hedgehog. Furthermore, they showed that those "hedgehogs of light" are not affected by defects in the material in which they were created.

Success in creating skyrmions in electromagnetic waves may be of crucial importance in practical applications. Today, materials in which skyrmions are formed are extremely rare and require cooling to very low temperatures, usually using nitrogen or liquid helium. The new discovery may in the future create this unique phenomenon in a variety of systems and materials such as liquids, nanoparticle arrays and gases of cold atoms. The research may also lead to new applications of skyrmions in information processing, its transfer and storage in optical and non-magnetic ways.

The research was conducted in collaboration with the Sarah and Moshe Zisafel Center for Nanoelectronics and the Russell Berry Institute for Research in Nanotechnology and with the support of the Jacobs Foundation, the I-CORE Center of Excellence, the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and the European Research Council (ERC).

For the article in Science: click here