Rapid cooling across a phase transition leaves behind defects; from domain walls in magnets to cosmic strings. The Kibble–Zurek mechanism that describes this formation of defects is seen at work in the spontaneous creation of solitons in an atomic Bose–Einstein condensate.
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Change history
07 November 2013
In the News & Views 'Ultracold gases: Shock cooling a universe' (Nature Physics 9, 605–606; 2013) by Martin W. Zwierlein the first sentence of the seventh paragraph should have read 'A topological defect can only form where at least three regions of different <Ψ> meet on a line, and only if the angle of <Ψ> changes by a non-zero multiple of 2π as one goes around that line — the marble makes a non-zero number of round trips around the Mexican hat'. This error was unfortunately introduced during the editorial process. Corrected after print 7 November 2013.
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Zwierlein, M. Shock cooling a universe. Nature Phys 9, 605–606 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2773
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2773
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