Watch water spiral down a bathroom drain and you are looking at one of the most stubborn puzzles in physics. Vortices, the swirling structures behind everything from turbulence around aircraft to the churn of weather systems, have resisted a complete scientific description for centuries. Now imagine shrinking that whirlpool down to the quantum scale, where the rules change entirely, and then being able to create and control it at the push of a button.
That is exactly what scientists at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied-research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), have achieved. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), our Quantum Physics (QPhysics) team demonstrates a method for generating and controlling three-dimensional quantum vortices on demand, a long-standing goal in quantum-fluid physics and atomtronics, the quantum technology of building devices from atoms rather than electrons.
Why quantum vortices matter
In the quantum realm, vortices behave very differently from their everyday cousins. The circulation of matter around a quantum vortex core cannot be set to any value; it is locked into fixed, discrete quanta. These structures sit at the centre of some of the hardest open problems in modern physics, including quantum turbulence and quantum dissipation, and the same physics appears in superconductors, neutron stars, and other quantum systems. Despite decades of research, generating and manipulating individual quantum vortices with precise control had remained one of the major challenges in the field.
“Quantum vortices are the elementary building blocks of superfluids, extraordinary states of matter in which atoms move collectively without friction,” explains Dr. Vijay Singh, Lead Researcher at TII’s Quantum Research Center and lead author of the study. “So far, generating them deterministically, with precise control over their number and dynamics, has been extremely difficult. Our work shows that driven superfluids can be transformed into programmable sources of three-dimensional quantum vortices, enabling entirely new classes of experiments that were previously impossible.”
From Shapiro steps to programmable vortices
The result builds directly on the team’s earlier breakthrough published in Science, which reported the first experimental observation of Shapiro steps on a driven atomic Josephson junction. This is the matter-wave analogue of the superconducting Josephson junction that underpins technologies from superconducting quantum circuits to the world’s most accurate voltage standards. Instead of carrying electrical current between superconductors, an atomic Josephson junction controls the coherent flow of ultracold atoms between two Bose–Einstein condensates separated by a microscopic barrier.
By tuning the properties of that junction, the team also resolved a long-standing problem in nonlinear physics: the crossover between vortex rings and vortex-free rarefaction pulses, two fundamentally different ways in which energy can travel through a quantum fluid.
“Atomic Josephson junctions have become one of the flagship platforms of atomtronics and effective routes to understand the physics occurring in superconducting devices,” says Prof. Luigi Amico, Executive Director of the Quantum Physics group at TII’s Quantum Research Center and principal investigator of the study. “In particular, this work demonstrates that they can do much more than transport atoms: they can engineer topological quantum states on demand. That opens exciting prospects for quantum simulation, precision sensing, and future quantum technologies based on coherent matter waves.”
What comes next
The findings arrive at a moment of rapidly growing international interest in atomtronics. Controlled quantum vortices could become key building blocks for future quantum sensors, inertial navigation systems, analog quantum simulators, and programmable quantum-fluid circuits. They also offer an ideal platform for studying turbulence and nonlinear dynamics under precisely controlled laboratory conditions.
For Abu Dhabi and the UAE, the study is a further marker of a fast-rising position in fore-front quantum science and technology. Through its Quantum Research Center, TII continues to build internationally recognised expertise across quantum simulation, quantum sensing, superconducting technologies, atomtronics, and quantum information science, in support of the UAE’s long-term vision of becoming a global leader in advanced research and deep technology.
The full study is available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2535111123 - 10.1073/pnas.2535111123.
To follow TII’s Quantum Research Center, visit www.tii.ae