Physicists Observe Trippy 'Vortex Rings' in a Magnetic Material For The First Time - ScienceAlert

If you've seen smoke rings, or bubble rings under water, you've seen vortex rings: doughnut-shaped vortices that form when fluid flows back on itself after being forced through a hole.

The new discovery is the first time vortex rings have been identified in a magnetic material, confirming a decades-old prediction - and it could help scientists identify even more complex magnetic structures that could be harnessed to develop new technologies.

Magnetic ring vortices were predicted over 20 years ago in 1998, when physicist Nigel Cooper of the University of Cambridge demonstrated magnetic vortices are analogous to the vortex rings seen in fluid dynamics.

It was only after computationally analysing these structures in the context of magnetic vorticity that the team figured out these were doughnut-shaped ring vortices, intersected by magnetisation singularities - a point where magnetisation vanishes - that reflect the polarisation reversal of the vortex and the antivortex.

"The observation of stable magnetic vortex rings opens up possibilities for further studies of complex three-dimensional solitons in bulk magnets, enabling the development of applications based on three-dimensional magnetic structures."