Introduction to Solitons

Under some circumstances, a rotation of orientational order can become concentrated in a narrow region. This localized distortion with a nonzero winding number is called a topological soliton. A soliton is a point in a 1D system, or a line in a 2D system, or a plane in a 3D system. Solitons differ from topological defects in many ways, including the presence or absence of a singularity, the type of measuring surface, the dimensionality of the structure, and the long- or short-range effects on the orientational order.