Fig. 1: Turbulence effect on optical knots.

a Superposition of LG beams in a trefoil knot, where \((p,l)\) are the respective radial and azimuthal indices of the modes. b Schematic of the system investigated in this work. In the presence of turbulence, the probability of an originally knotted field (trefoil knot) getting untied increases. In this case, the trefoil knot transforms into a Hopf link or an unknot as it loses crossings due to the refractive index perturbations inside the turbulent medium.