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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."
It's my impression that Maxwell's equations can account for the existence of magnetic monopoles; in fact, there are some interesting physics problems you can do (using Maxwell's equations) if you assume the existence of magnetic monopoles.
The equation can be stated "the divergence of the magnetic field equals the density of magnetic monopoles", but of course, in most situations, it's easier to say "zero" than "the density of magnetic monopoles", since there aren't any magnetic monopoles around.
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I agree, it doesn't sound like they are talking about real monopole particles. It sounds like they have something that mimics the presense of a monopole, much like an electron hole in a semiconductor mimics a positron. The electron hole behaves like a positive charge and it moves around just like a particle. When it comes in contact with a free electron they even "anihilate each other" with a release of energy.
An electron hole is merely a pattern that mimics an anti-matter electron.
I think the crystal they describe is just aligning its internal feilds in the same sort of pattern you would get if there were a monopole present in an ordinary region. That pattern then moves around like a particle would and has the same sort of effects a monopole would have.
If anyone has a link or explanation that they are talking about a REAL monopole please jump in, but I'm pretty sure this is just a pattern that mimics a particle, not a real particle.
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Take a magnet 6"x2"x1/2" and carve a sphere out the middle. What would be the characteristics of this sphere, what would happen if it was rolled across a flat steel plane?
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You misunderstand; I have open field lines which terminate at the stellar surface (where the field is generated). Without the wind, the field is a dipole; however, the wind rips the field lines open and creates unterminated lines. In what way is this unrealistic? Stars have been observed which appear to be doing this.
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The other day, ther was a Slashdot article that supposed that reality (as we know it) is a 3-dimensional surface lying on a larger multidimensional surface, of 6+ dimensions. All of this was to bring the relative force of Gravity in line with the strengths of other microscopic forces.
In the case of "magnetic monopoles"... putting aside everything I've ever learned in my years as an electrical engineer... lets suppose that these actually exist.
The first pattern we see in nature is that matter exists in pairs... particles appear out of vacuum as matter and antimatter, we have electrostatic charge from protons and electrons, so I would think that you'd still have to have a "sink and source" arrangement when dealing with magnetic monopoles. Another law that we hate to break is the conservation of energy. Over a closed space, all exchange of energy nets to zero. So, I would think that for a field emitter to exist, there must be a field receiver... the only question is where does the energy go.
Tieing these two theories together, what's to say that a "monopole" in 3-space isn't really still a dipole in multidimensional space? In 3-space, we'd see a discontinuity, but over the whole space, we'd still have the continuity that Maxwell's classic equations require.... There really are "returning" field lines, they're just not directly observable because they don't interact with our form of matter; like dark matter in gravitic space, who's to say that similar objects can't exist in electromagnetic fields?