Evidence of Magnetic Monopoles Found?

TheMatt writes "As reported on PhysicsWeb and published in Science (subscription required), researchers at AIST and co-workers believe they have found evidence of magnetic monopoles. They observed an anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnetic crystal that they say can only be explained via magnetic monopoles. To refresh your memory, magnetic monopoles are the magnetic analogue of electrons and other charged particles--a "north" or "south" pole only. Dirac in 1931 showed that the existence of a magnetic monopole naturally leads to the quantization of electric and magnetic charge. Thus, showing the existence of just one magnetic monopole would be quite profound for physics, but their mass (> 10^16 GeV) has made searches for them difficult."

Comments

I doubt it

[Omega037]

I took calc based physics II over the summer and remember specifically that monopoles either don't exist, or are so small that it wouldn't matter either way. I somewhat doubt that monopoles do exist, merely at such a small size it appears to have only one pole.

Magnitism, much like gravity, is one of those invisible forces that we don't truly understand why they exist. We understand the properties and interactions of these forces, and can apply both when beign used to solve a problem. But our understanding of why masses attract each other or why magnetic particles attract each other is still unknown.

Without this fundamental understanding of these forces, we can never truly understand their nature. It is entirely possible that what we think of as magnitism is completely wrong. Much like how centrifugal forces appear to exist but don't, magnetism could actually just be a trick created by another phenomenon.

Besides, monopoles sound too much like monopolies.