for studying a range of topological phenomena relevant to both condensed matter and particle physics.

One view of the cuprate high-transition temperature (high-T c ) superconductors is that they are conventional superconductors where the pairing occurs between weakly interacting quasiparticles, which stand in one-to-one correspondence with the electrons in ordinary metals -although the theory has to be pushed to its limit [1]. An alternative view is that the electrons organize into collective textures (e.g. charge and spin stripes) which cannot be mapped onto the electrons in ordinary metals. The phase diagram, a complex function of various parameters (temperature, doping and magnetic field), should then be approached using quantum field theories of objects such as textures and strings, rather than point-like electrons [2,3,4,5,6]. In an external magnetic field, magnetic flux penetrates type-II superconductors via vortices, each carrying one flux quantum [7]. The vortices form lattices of resistive material embedded in the non-resistive superconductor and can reveal the nature of the ground state -e.g. a conventional metal or an ordered, striped phase -which would have appeared had superconductivity not intervened. Knowledge of this ground state clearly provides the most appropriate starting point for a pairing theory. Here we report that for one high-T c superconductor, the applied field which imposes the vortex lattice, also induces antiferromagnetic order. Ordinary quasiparticle pictures cannot account for the nearly fieldindependent antiferromagnetic transition temperature revealed by our measurements.La 2-x Sr x CuO 4 , is the simplest high-T c superconductor. The undoped compound is an insulating antiferromagnet, where the spin moments on adjacent Cu 2+ ions are antiparallel [8]. Introduction of charge carriers via Sr doping reduces the ordered moment until it vanishes at x<0.13. In addition, for x>0.05 the commensurate antiferromagnetism is replaced by incommensurate order [2,3,9,10], where the repeat distance for the pattern of ordered moments is substantially larger than the spacing between neighbouring copper ions. La 2-x Sr x CuO 4 becomes a 2 superconductor for Sr dopings of 0.06

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