Never seen ball lightning, supposed to be cool: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...ball-lightning
Knotted structures called skyrmions seem to mimic ball lightning
The physics behind a weird electrical phenomenon — glowing orbs of lightning — may be mimicked by something even stranger. A magnetic structure proposed for the natural oddity known as ball lightning makes an appearance in a newfound variety of a knotlike entity called a skyrmion, a team of scientists reports.
Now, Hall and colleagues have created an analog of such linked magnetic fields in a seemingly unrelated type of knotted structure, a skyrmion. Found in a variety of substances — from thin films of magnetic materials to liquid crystals — skyrmions are a kind of disturbance within matter (SN: 2/17/18, p. 18). The objects can move like independent particles, shifting from place to place within a material while maintaining their knotted configuration (SN: 10/18/14, p. 22). And like a tight knot in a thread, skyrmions are difficult to undo, making them relatively stable structures.
Within the condensate, the spins produced something analogous to a magnetic field: The condensate behaved as if it were a charged particle being pushed around by a magnetic field when in reality no such magnetic field existed. Like the skyrmion itself, the scientists realized, the imitation magnetic field was knotted, and it matched the interlinked rings of magnetic fields proposed for ball lightning.