Magnetic bubbles: summary and outlook

I have written a series of blog posts related to the article (see this) that has gradually developed during the last weeks. This article was inspired by a single puzzling astrophysical observation but was extended by further similar observations. The discussion of these findings allowed us to develop a TGD based vision about the generation of astrophysical structures to a much more detailed level. This vision should apply also to other interactions.

The foregoing discussion suggests that the dynamics of gravitational fields could reduce to the dynamics of flux tubes subject to the conservation of total Kähler electric fluxes, which have a definite sign.

The topological dynamics would be essentially re-organization of the network formed by electric flux quanta as nodes of the network connected to each other by flux tubes, which can also carry Kähler electric flux. Twistor lift of TGD and M⁸-H duality (see this and this) led to a rather similar picture for the scattering amplitudes (see this and this) in terms of fundamental fermions.

This generalizes also to the dynamics of gauge fields. Flux tubes can be characterized by the value of h_eff characterizing a given interaction, and the notion of gravitational Planck constant generalizes to all interactions. The key physical idea is that Nature is theoretician friendly: if quantum coherence is to be preserved, a phase transition replacing the ordinary Planck constant ℏ with ℏ_eff must take place, when the interaction strength Q₁Q₂/4π ℏ becomes too large for the perturbation series to converge. The alternative option is that the system decomposes to coherent subunits such that the perturbation series converges for them. This means a reduction of quantum coherence scale.

The understanding of atomic and molecular physics at the space-time level has been a longstanding challenge of TGD.

1. I have proposed that h_eff>h for the valence bonds as flux tubes could allow us to gain insights about the periodic table (see this). Monopole flux tubes can also carry ordinary electric fluxes and this would allow us to understand the recent empirical findings about chemical bonds as carriers of electric flux (see this). TGD also suggests a flux tube model for hydrogen bonds. Also a generalization of hydrogen and valence bonds involving quantum gravitation in the TGD sense (see this) can be considered so that quantum gravitation would define an essential part of biochemistry.
2. What about atoms in TGD Universe? The proposed description for the gravitational interaction at the level planetary system in terms of flux tubes could generalize almost as such to a description of electromagnetic interactions at the atomic level. The U-shaped flux tube pairs with opposite magnetic charges and carrying electromagnetic flux besides monopole magnetic flux would emanate from protons and connect them to electrons. For a pair of opposite charged particles, the U-shaped flux tubes would be closed. For ions the flux tube pair would continue outside the atom. The flux tubes of a given atom could also form flux tube bundles. Also linking and knotting are possible for the flux tubes so that the capacity for topological quantum computation emerges.
3. A powerful restriction comes from the condition that monopole flux tubes must be closed. The proposal is that they are U-shaped and form pairs of flux tubes connecting two systems. This does not require that the Kähler electric charges of the members are opposite. For gravitational flux tube pairs they are of the same sign. For gauge interactions they are of the same sign but the sign can vary.

There are many topics related to flux tubes, which are not considered in the article.

1. TGD predicts homologically non-trivial flux tubes: in the simplest situation X⁴= X²× S², the CP₂ projection S² is a homologically trivial geodesic sphere. If they are allowed by the preferred extremal property, they would serve as natural correlates for the Maxwellian magnetic fields. One cannot exclude flux tubes with light-like boundaries, and they would be even more natural counterparts for Maxwellian fluxes.

In the standard terminology of condensed matter physics (see this), they would correspond to the magnetization M, whereas the monopole part of the measured magnetic field, which needs no currents as its sources, would correspond to the magnetizing “external” field H, which can be said to control M (and possibly containing h_eff=h phases). The presence of monopole fluzes allows us to understand the puzzle posed by the fact the magnetic field of Earth is non-vanishing although dissipation of currents implies the decay of the Maxwellian part.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.