In 2001, Michael Berry4 published the paper ”Knotted Zeros in the Quantum States of Hydrogen” in Foundations of Physics. In this paper we show how to place Berry’s discovery in the context of general knot theory and in the context of our formulations for quantum knots. Berry gave a time independent wave function for hydrogen, as a map from three space R³ to the complex plane and such that the inverse image of 0 in the complex plane contains a knotted curve in R³. We show that for knots in R³ this is a generic situation in that every smooth knot K in R³ has a smooth classifying map f : R³ −→ C (the complex plane) such that f⁻¹(0) = K. This leaves open the question of characterizing just when such f are wave-functions for quantum systems. One can compare this result with the work of Mark Dennis and his collaborators and with the work of Lee Rudolph. Our approach provides great generality to the structure of knotted zeros of a wavefunction and opens up many new avenues for research in the relationships of quantum theory and knot theory. We show how this classifying construction can be related our previous work on two dimensional and three dimensional mosaic and lattice quantum knots.

Date Published: 13 May 2019
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10984, Quantum Information Science, Sensing, and Computation XI, 109840A (13 May 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2518685

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10984:
Quantum Information Science, Sensing, and Computation XI
Eric Donkor; Michael Hayduk; Michael R. Frey; Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr.; John M. Myers, Editor(s)