Symmetry Breaking and Topological Defect Formation in Ion Coulomb Crystals

Understand

Symmetry breaking phase transitions play an important role in nature.

• When a system traverses such a transition at a finite rate, its causally disconnected regions choose the new broken symmetry state independently.
• Where such local choices are incompatible, defects will form with densities predicted to follow a power law scaling in the rate of the transition.
• The importance of this Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) ranges from cosmology to condensed matter [1-4].