Studying knot and chirality patterns found in both materials and the universe

What if the materials we design in the lab could help us understand the universe?  And vice versa?

Perhaps surprisingly, the same kinds of knotted structures and chiral phenomena show up in both cutting-edge materials, studied by materials scientists, and the extreme forms of matter found in the early universe or inside neutron stars, studied by high-energy particle physicists.

One example is a wave-like structure found in chiral magnets, called the chiral soliton lattice, that is also predicted to appear in nuclear matter.  

This raises the question of whether we can design materials to act as analogs for extreme forms of matter? Do they undergo phase transitions in similar ways? Can we use them to study how things like heat, charge, or momentum move through matter, when those properties are nearly impossible to measure directly in high-energy experiments?    

While our researchers are using materials as a test bed for high-energy physics, they are also exploring deeper theoretical questions with the support of mathematicians. For instance, the team is investigating the idea that certain particles made purely of force, known as glueballs, might actually be tiny knots of energy, and how this is connected to chirality at the smallest scales.  This work will help us better understand the fundamental laws of physics.

And the cross-pollination between fields goes both ways: our researchers are applying concepts from high-energy physics to drive innovation in materials science. These ideas will help spark advances in next-generation memory and quantum computing, as well as radiation-tolerant particle detectors that could support safe nuclear reactor decommissioning and future space missions.

Scientific Questions

Questions from the fusion of Math and High Energy Particle Physics & Cosmology

1. Does the Hopfion approach capture the known characteristics of the low-lying glueballs in Yang-Mills theory? How to relate them with chirality in real-life QCD?
2. Can hydrodynamic vortex knots be stable? Are there any stable knotted cosmic strings? Can they be applied to Materials Science?

Questions from the fusion of Materials Science and High Energy Particle Physics & Cosmology

1. Can Materials Science answer the fundamental questions in HEP?
2. Skyrmions and domain walls are present in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and magnets. How are they related?
3. What can we expect in unknown properties of QCD matter based on knowledge of Material Science?

Questions from the fusion of Materials Science and Detector Physics

1. Can we apply new chiral materials for innovative high performance particle detectors?
2. Can we make a compact and efficient detector for photon/particle polarization with a chiral material?
3. Can we apply new chiral materials for particle detectors with high radiation tolerance?

Recent Publications & Achievements

1. Yasui, S., Nitta, M., & Sasaki, C. (2025). Emergent chirality and superfluidity of parity-doubled baryons in neutron stars. Physical Review D, 111(3), 034029. Link to text
2. Ejima, R., Gubler, P., Sasaki, C., & Shigaki, K. (2025). Toward a direct measurement of partial restoration of chiral symmetry at J-PARC E16 via density-induced chiral mixing. Physical Review C, 111(5), 055201. Link to text
3. Amari, Y., Nitta, M., Sasaki, C., Shigaki, K., Yano, S., & Yasui, S. (2025). Glueballonia as Hopfions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16810. Link to text
4. Amari, Y., & Nitta, M. (2025). Skyrmion crystal phase on a magnetic domain wall in chiral magnets. Physical Review B, 111(13), 134441. Link to text
5. Fukushima, K., Hidaka, Y., Inoue, K., Shigaki, K., & Yamaguchi, Y. (2024). Hanbury-Brown–Twiss signature for clustered substructures probing primordial inhomogeneity in hot and dense QCD matter. Physical Review C, 109(5), L051903. Link to text