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

Re:For non-physics geeks...

[PurpleBob]

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.