Magnetic monopoles discovered?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090903/full/news.2009.881.html

 

"People have been looking for monopoles in cosmic rays and particle accelerators — even Moon rocks," says Jonathan Morris, a researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy in Berlin.

 

Now Morris and others have found the strongest evidence yet for magnetic monopoles, in small crystals about the size of an ear plug. When the crystals are chilled to near absolute zero, they seem to fill with tiny single points of north and south. The points are less than a nanometre apart, and cannot be measured directly. Nevertheless, Morris and other physicists believe they are there. They make their case in two papers published today in the journal Science, and other work published on the pre-print server arXiv.org.

 

They cite these papers:

 

Morris, J. et al. Science advanced online publication doi:10.1126/science.1178868 (2009).

Fennell, T. et al. Science advance online publication doi:10.1126/science.1177582 (2009).

Kadowaki, H. et al. preprint at http://arXiv.org/abs/0908.3568v2 (2009).

Bramwell, S. T. et al. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0956 (2009).

 

If they're right, this is amazing. All these years of reading threads on SFN where monopoles are proclaimed to be impossible... and here they are. I'm now curious to see if someone else will overturn the claims or if their conclusions are truly correct.

 

(Here's where I wish I could skip a few semesters ahead so I could actually know what the papers are talking about. That could be important.)

Edited September 4, 2009 by Cap'n Refsmmat

[insane_alien]

well to be fair, a lot of the threads where monopoles came up had a lot more wrong with them than the fact they require monopoles to exist.

 

most of them required them to be extremely common and dipoles to be rare.

[swansont]

My guess is that this is another weird condensed matter/collective system behavior, similar on spirit to fractional charge and charge/spin separation that has been observed; Dirac predicted monopole behavior in some systems.

 

"magnetic monoples don't exist" refers to bare monopole particles in conditions where Maxwell's equations apply; I imagine that these are quantum systems where those classical rules must be modified. But condensed matter gets out of my physics comfort zone very quickly.

[Gasparri]

 

If they're right, this is amazing. All these years of reading threads on SFN where monopoles are proclaimed to be impossible... and here they are. I'm now curious to see if someone else will overturn the claims or if their conclusions are truly correct.

 

(Here's where I wish I could skip a few semesters ahead so I could actually know what the papers are talking about. That could be important.)

 

In my research of mobius topology I discovered a mobius monopole.

I labeled the thing with North South and the elements A,B,C. What is curious

to me is how much it resembles the topic of discussion here. If you

want to see it I made a demonstration and stuck it here.

[ajb]

All these years of reading threads on SFN where monopoles are proclaimed to be impossible... and here they are. I'm now curious to see if someone else will overturn the claims or if their conclusions are truly correct.

 

Monopoles require an extra term in Maxwell's equations. If you include this term you make the equations much more symmetric. So, from this point of view one would like monopoles to exist. Also, they provide the best explanation I know of that explains electric charge quantisation.

[swansont]

In my research of mobius topology I discovered a mobius monopole.

I labeled the thing with North South and the elements A,B,C. What is curious

to me is how much it resembles the topic of discussion here. If you

want to see it I made a demonstration and stuck it here.

 

I invite you to review the rules of this forum, which you agreed to follow when you registered.

 

Specifically, 2.5 and 2.10 (emphasis added)

 

2.5 Stay on topic. Posts should be relevant to the discussion at hand. This means that you shouldn't use scientific threads to advertise your own personal theory, or post only to incite a hostile argument.

 

2.10 Keep alternative science and your own personal conjecture to the appropriate forum (Speculations). Threads in the ordinary science forums should be answered with ordinary science, not your own personal hypothesis. Posting pet "theories" in mainstream science forums is considered thread hijacking.

 

This is not to be construed as an invitation to discuss your views on the matter in this thread.

[Gasparri]

I don't have a theory. I have a discovery.

 

Apparently your view of me is ad-hominid.

 

Grow up young man.

 

Please remove my account from this site as no provisions are provided so I can remove myself.