In the past few years, physicists have created long-predicted quasiparticles called hopfions—3D, localized, knot-like arrangements of a magnetic material’s spin texture. A hopfion can be described in terms of its Hopf number H, which counts how many loops of spins are interlinked in the knot. Researchers have proposed using hopfions in spintronic computers, where H would encode information. This is because a hopfion is a topologically protected state, meaning H stays the same under many deformation conditions. In new computational work, Shoya Kasai of the University of Tokyo and colleagues have developed a method for splitting high-H hopfions into multiple lower-H hopfions, an operation that would be useful for such spintronic information-storage devices [1, 2].
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