The potential cosmological implications of textures are described here . Examples of delocalized texture configurations in one and two dimensions. Due to their extremely high energies, cosmological defects have not yet been detected, and it is virtually impossible to produce them, even in the most powerful particle accelerators. On the other hand, this is one of the reasons why people are interested in them - if they can be found today, they will be a unique direct link to the physics of the first moments of the universe. In the laboratory, topological defects are commonly observed in condensed matter systems.
Liquid crystals exhibit an array of topological defects, such as strings and monopoles.
Defects can also been found in biochemistry, notably in the procees of protein folding . Long-string intercommuting in a liquid crystal. The two strings excange ends at the crossing. The evolution of a string network in a liquid crystal. The four snapshots have the same size, but were obtained at different times.