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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."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is really fundamental and amazing stuff, if it turns out to be true. (Every decade or so someone discovers monopoles, then six months later, oops!, guess we didn't.) The reason why it's fundamental and amazing is the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics.
:)
Relativity and quantum mechanics currently give physicists nightmares. As near as we can tell, both are fantastically accurate descriptions of the world, and both are fundamentally at odds with each other. If we could find a flaw in one or the other, that would potentially open the door to a new and better theory, one which might allow us to reconcile these differences without resorting to theology [*].
Now, when Einstein devised relativity, he based it very heavily on Maxwell's Laws. The Laws are a set of four equations which describe pretty much all electromagnetic phenomena out there. It was the world's first Grand Unified Theory (GUT), in that it unified electricity and magnetism into one package. And one of Maxwell's Laws ("the divergence of the magnetic field equals zero") has, as a direct consequence, an absolute law: NO MAGNETIC MONOPOLES EXIST. NO OPEN MAGNETIC FIELD LINES EXIST.
So if Maxwell's Laws are wrong and relativity is built heavily on Maxwell's Laws, then there's a tantalizing chance relativity is wrong.
Or if Maxwell's Laws are right and monopoles are conclusively proven not to exist, then there's a tantalizing chance quantum mechanics is wrong.
Either way, physics wins: no matter what happens, we get to see a flaw in our current theories. And seeing that flaw is the first step to coming up with better, more accurate theories.
What's the worst-case scenario? The worst-case scenario is these guys are wrong, just like every other monopole researcher before, and the "do magnetic monopoles exist?" question remains unresolved for the next few hundred years.
Warning: I'm not a professional physics geek. In fact, I may be stark barking mad wrong here.
[*] Theology, aka string theory. Sorry, but any theory which literally cannot be experimentally tested at any realistic energy level isn't a theory at all. It's an article of faith.
Many moons ago when Star Control II came out, one of the resources you could collect was 'Magnetic Monopoles'. I remember thinking I was all smart by drilling it into a friend of mine's head that it was impossible to have one of those.
Man I hope he doesn't find my email address.
"Derp de derp."
We can look forward to visits from Pak Protectors soon.
I detected this large supply of monopoles, but it turned out to be a Pak Protector's ship.
They I ate all these yams, and damn do I have a hangover.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Right. Just as a reminder to anyone reading this thread, the three axioms from which special relativity can be derived are:
The third is often not stated, as it's implicit in most of physics anyway. I wish I could remember the entire proof, but it's been a few years. It's not especially arcane or incomprehensible, though, and you don't need a degree in physics to understand it.
The fact that special relativity has so few dependencies, and is relatively simple, is part of its brilliance. It's also why theories that special relativity is flawed tend to be treated with extreme skepticism--it's hard to think of a theory that's more solid.
Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics supports the idea that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, but it's not the only evidence; there's the Michelson-Morley experiment, for starters. So Maxwell's theory falling over would not prove that the speed of light wasn't constant, and would not knock down special relativity.
If you want to knock down special relativity in favor of your own masterpiece, though, axiom #2 is certainly the one to go for... Throwing out either of the others tends to be a bit self-defeating. That's why most aether-theory crackpots claim that the Michelson-Morley experiment is flawed in some bizarre way.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This is an inaccurate representation of the article. The article says:
- Magnetic monopoles are also predicted by some theories that seek to unify the electroweak and strong interactions. However, the monopole masses that are predicted by these so-called grand unified theories are much too large - about 10^16 giga-electronvolts - to be detected in experiments.
They probably don't exist at all. Even if they do exist, it's only within the context of certain theoretical frameworks that this mass estimate could apply. If the mass is in the 10^16 GeV range, then there's no hope of creating them artificially with any forseeable technology; the only way to search for them would be to look for ones that occurred naturally soon after the big bang, and happen to cruise through your detector on a certain day.Instead of searching for magnetic monopoles in real space, Yoshinori Tokura of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba and co-workers turned to momentum space - the mathematical space in which condensed matter physicists construct Fermi surfaces, Brillouin zones and so on. The team was motivated by recent theoretical work which suggested that the behaviour of magnetic monopoles in momentum space is closely related to the anomalous Hall effect.
I'm not a condensed matter specialist, so I don't really understand what they're saying here, but it sounds like they may be saying they found something mathematically analogous to a magnetic monopole, not a real magnetic monopole. Unfortunately they don't seem to have posted preprints anywhere, but they certainly aren't creating 10^16 GeV particles in a condensed matter lab, nor does it sound like they claim to have captured natural ones.
Find free books.
they should be investigated and stopped
from doimg their anti-competetive magnetic practices.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Exactly. That was the first thing that jumped out at me too.
Do you reckon there's cold fusion going on in those crystals instead, perhaps?
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
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?