Spin spiral models

thingiverse

Upon reading a research paper about spin spirals being generated by dipole-dipole interactions within a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate, I became fascinated with designing a physical object to represent the resulting spin spiral. These objects showcase the transverse spin rotation angle with distance along the quantization axis of a 1D spinor Bose-Einstein condensate with dipole-dipole interactions, just like figure 1 of the paper shows. There's also a separate spin spiral for different evolution times where the spiral gets more twisty as the evolution time increases. The included models stand at 10cm tall, but I've created a customizable version too, allowing users to adjust the height, width, and thickness of the spiral. Instructions I took a screenshot of figure 1(g) from this research paper and fed it into a web app that extracted the data points. Next, I fed those points into MatLAB, smoothed them out, interpolated uniformly spaced vectors for the angular change between each point, then output code that could be compiled with OpenSCAD. The finished spin spiral is a series of twisted linear extrusions whose angles match exactly those detailed in the initial figure.