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  • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

The knotty problem of tuning an instrument

Tuning the resonances of an object is crucial in many settings, from musical instruments to ultrasensitive detectors for electromagnetic and gravitational waves. This task might seem straightforward but its mathematical description has been shown to involve rich topological structures known as knots and braids.

This is a summary of: Patil, Y. S. S. et al. Measuring the knot of non-Hermitian degeneracies and non-commuting braids. Nature 607, 271–275 (2022).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01749-1

‘Expert opinion’ is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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