A new construction of rational electromagnetic knots

Abstract

We set up a correspondence between solutions of the Yang-Mills equations on ${\mathbb R}\times S^3$ and in Minkowski spacetime via de Sitter space. Some known Abelian and non-Abelian exact solutions are rederived. For the Maxwell case we present a straightforward algorithm to generate an infinite number of explicit solutions, with fields and potentials in Minkowski coordinates given by rational functions of increasing complexity. We illustrate our method with a nontrivial example.