Knots from wall--anti-wall annihilations with stretched strings

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decay of wall-anti-wall pairs and demonstrates that a vortex-string stretched between them results in a residual knot soliton, revealing new topological phenomena in field theory.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of knot solitons surviving wall-anti-wall annihilation when a vortex-string is present, highlighting a novel topological outcome.

Findings

A vortex-string can stabilize a knot soliton after wall-anti-wall decay.

The residual knot is identified as a Hopfion.

Wall-anti-wall annihilation can leave behind nontrivial topological structures.

Abstract

A pair of a domain wall and an anti-domain wall is unstable to decay. We show that when a vortex-string is stretched between the walls, there remains a knot soliton (Hopfion) after the pair annihilation.