Stabilizing the false vacuum: Mott skyrmions

Topological excitations keep fascinating physicists since many decades. While individual vortices and solitons emerge and have been observed in many areas of physics, their most intriguing higher dimensional topological relatives, skyrmions (smooth, topologically stable textures) and magnetic monopoles -- emerging almost necessarily in any grand unified theory and responsible for charge quantization -- remained mostly elusive. Here we propose that loading a three-component nematic superfluid such as $^{23}$Na into a deep optical lattice and thereby creating an insulating core, one can create topologically stable skyrmion textures and investigate their properties in detail. We show furthermore that the spectrum of the excitations of the superfluid and their quantum numbers change dramatically in the presence of the skyrmion, and they reflect the presence of a trapped monopole, as imposed by the skyrmion's topology.