In Lewis Carroll’s novel, Through the Looking-Glass, Alice encounters a mirror-like portal to a world where rules of reality are reversed. In the 1980s, the story inspired the name for a ring-like vortex, which is predicted to emerge as monopoles decay. This “Alice ring” then flips the charges of any other monopoles that pass through it.
Now, for the first time, these Alice rings have been observed in the lab by researchers in the US and Finland. Their experiment involves ultracold atoms and it could shed light on fundamental processes in particle physics and cosmology.
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