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."