A paper co-authored by members of the Bristol Theoretical Physics Group has been featured as editorial suggestion on the cover of the 30 December 2016 edition of Physical Review Letters, one of the leading international journals in Physics.

 

The research, titled 'Weaving Knotted Vector Fields with Tunable Helicity', was co-authored by Prof Mark Dennis and Dr David Foster, in collaboration with Hridesh Kedia and Prof William Irvine at the University of Chicago. The paper presents a general mathematical method for constructing a large variety of knotted vector fields such as the flow of fluids or electromagnetic field lines. The work could potentially give rise to new insights about how knots can occur, and be utilised (e.g. for data storage) in fluids, plasmas, light and other physical systems.

 

The Bristol work is part of the research project 'SPOCK: Scientific Properties of Complex Knots', a collaboration between the Universities of Bristol and Durham supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The aim of the project is to create new computational tools and mathematical techniques for the analysis, synthesis and exploitation of knotted structures in a wide range of complex physical phenomena.