Making Magnetic Monopoles and Other Physics Exotica

PhysicsDavid writes "Physicists have been searching for magnetic monopoles pretty much since they knew about magnetism and definitely since Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Now some researchers have shown that using some weird mirror materials will allow them to create something indistinguishable from a monopole in a lab experiment. A paper about it was published today in the journal Science as an advance online publication (abstract; full article available only to AAAS members). The technique looks like it could be used to create analog systems of other kinds of exotic particles that haven't yet been observed, such as axions. The theorists who proposed this are working with experimenters to try to create these systems and study them in depth this year."

Comments

Multiple monopoles?

[ErroneousBee]

I thought there was only one magnetic monopole, and one photon, in this universe.

Re:Multiple monopoles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see how you might confuse photons with zune users.

Re:Multiple monopoles?

[geckipede]

I think he is referring to the way that Feynmann diagrams allow you to represent an antiparticle as being a particle moving backwards in time. A particle/antiparticle pair then just becomes one particle going forwards and backwards in a loop. There was some talk that this way of looking at it may be physically real and that all particles are one, but taking a really circuitious route through time. It doesn't hold up well because there isn't enough antimatter around to allow it as far as we can see. I'm not sure it was ever supposed to apply to photons in any case.

Re:Multiple monopoles?

[MikTheUser]

I'm not sure it was ever supposed to apply to photons in any case.

Probably not, since photons, being their own antiparticles, never had arrows attached to them in Feynman graphs to begin with.

Re:Multiple monopoles?

[ErroneousBee]

I thought it still sort of worked for photons, cos they are their own anti-particle.

My party piece is to bore anyone who will listen with an argument that the universe only needs one photon travelling backwards and forwards in time.

But the WTFs are usually reserved for the followup where I set fire to my head.

nobel

[tritonman]

I think this would be a no-brainer for the nobel prize if they can really make something equivalent to a magnetic monopole.

Re:nobel

[digitrev]

Absolutely. The better part is what this would mean for Maxwell's equations. If it turns out that you can create something indistinguishable from a magnetic monopole, then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.

Re:nobel

[corsec67]

then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.

Traveling north or south becomes much cheaper than heading east or west?

Re:nobel

[MikTheUser]

It wouldn't matter much at all to Maxwell's equations. The model is well fit to accommodate magnetic monopoles, if the

div B = 0

equation were modified to read, say

div B = rho_m / mu_0

in analogy to Gauss' law. The defining qualities of Maxwell's model, such as the compliance with relativity, would remain intact.

For further reading on this, David J. Griffiths' 'Introduction to Electrodynamics' is many a professor's first recommendation to students.

Re:nobel

[pla]

Traveling north or south becomes much cheaper than heading east or west?

Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy"). That alone makes me take this "discovery" with a grain of salt the size of Bonneville.

If this amounts to more than sloppy science or outright fraud, I would guess that it comes with the same sort of huge disclaimer that quantum teleportation has regarding FTL information transmission - "It just doesn't work that way".

Not really "indistinguishable"

[Roger W Moore]

If it turns out that you can create something indistinguishable from a magnetic monopole, then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.

This is "indistinguishable" from a monopole in the same way that an image in a mirror is "indistinguishable" from the real object. While extremely interesting there will be bound to be edge effects given the finite size of the mirror and there must physically be a second pole somewhere because the material cannot spontaneously acquire a net magnetic charge...unless there is some significant new physics occuring. Hence I would take "indistinguishable" with a very large grain of salt. It is an extremely interesting result though.

instructables

[gEvil (beta)]

There's an instructable for making magnetic Monopoly right here. As for finding the physics erotica, your on your own--I'm at work right now...

Searching for magnetic monopoles?

[shawn(at)fsu]

That's easy. Take a regular magnet and cut it in half, gees do I have to do all the heavy thinking around here.

Monopole Magnets at last!

[rk]

Now, do we go for Unified Field Theory and get tachyon bolt weapons, or Nanominiaturization and score the hovertank chassis?

Re:Monopole Magnets at last!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just waiting for Centauri Genetics, but I'd settle for Controlled Singularity.

Conservation of energy is broken?

[mpoon]

I was reading TFA that was linked, and the author said something about the monopole inducing a current "without dying out." So I presume that he is using some sort of metal in a device to test this current. If the current doesn't die out, isn't there constant heat loss in the metal due to resistance from the current? Where is that heat loss made up, concerning conservation of energy?

Re:How Maxwell's Equations would change

[Anonymous Coward]

Most notably, if even a single magnetic monopole exists in the universe, electric charge quantization is the result, as shown by Dirac in 1931. We currently don't really actually know why the hell things are quantized, so that would be ...interesting. If anything, it's a bit peculiar that electric charge is quantized given that we haven't seen magnetic monopoles to date (of course if electric charge wasn't quantized we wouldn't exist... but anyway...)

Quantization in general is weird and inelegant and ugly (the maths is just horrible and shitty compared to the pure background-independent elegance of general relativity or einstein-cartan (general relativity with spin, basically)), but demonstration of the existence of magnetic monopoles would go some way to making it less ugly.

Re:This was one of the issues with the SSC...

[meringuoid]

The Superconducting Super-Collider to be built in Texas fifteen years ago used magnetic monopoles in its design. In my physics class in 1991 we received a lecture visit from an SSC representative who casually hand-waved the matter of inventing such a thing.

Er, wow. Citation? The SSC was pushing the boundaries all right - the clue's in the name, superconducting, and that's difficult to do even now as witness the LHC explosion - but I hadn't heard that it would have used magnetic monopoles. Possibly it might have hoped to create magnetic monopoles in some exotic collision, but not to have them as part of its structure.

thinking about magnets...

[hort_wort]

I never really got the idea of magnetic monopoles. I studied them for a couple weeks, but they just seem so intuitively wrong. Magnetic fields are caused by electrons moving... but if you have a monopole, that's like saying that you have electrons going somewhere but coming from nowhere. Or coming from somewhere and going to nowhere. This isn't possible though because energy is conserved -- even if you blew up the electron, it'd still just turn into waves that are still there. It is a fundamentally flawed idea.

I'm not saying mag monopoles are impossible, but it would take a drastic rewrite of everything we "know" to get it to work. Yes, yes, I know Maxwell's equations can be modified to get them to work, but so what? Remember when you studied aether as an undergrad before relativity? Same thing here -- an idea that is most likely wrong, but you can still play with it for mental exercise. Plus a bunch of physicists just love to try to find it because it's an automatic Nobel prize if they pull it off.

Monopole magnets are not hard

[philspear]

I can't believe people are having a hard time with this. It's easy! Just cut off the pole you don't want!

Geez!

Re:Monopole magnets are not hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, I think all of the slashdot readers from Poland are a bit uneasy about being cut off...

Re:Monopole magnets are not hard

[Mindwarp]

Hey - you're not meant to complain about Slashdot Pole options!

I used to use magnetic monopoles

[goombah99]

Back when I was designing magnetic bubble memory we used to use monopole equations to represent the bubbles.

No violation of physics here because they were always paired. But the pairs in the media are well separated so it's a btter approximation to use two monopoles than a dipole.

That is to say, each bubble is really a cyllinder running from the bottom of the thin film to the top just like it is in vertical recording HD. You can treat the top as a monopole and the bottom as an opposite monopole and get a very good model of bubble-to-bubble interactions.

But how good an objection is that?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I mean it is true we do not OBSERVE much antimatter in this universe, but that doesn't mean it is not present in some sense:

A) It could be in some other part of the universe beyond our effective observational horizon. Granted there are some reasons to think not, but it is a possibility.

B) It could be that the antimatter simply exists in some 'other place'. Given that we haven't at all settled the actual architecture of spacetime, it could be that the antimatter is in a location which is either topologically distant/inaccessible or in dimensions not readily visible to us.

C) Antimatter could be segregated in a different part of time itself. If we imagined that the arrow of time in our universe reverses every now and then, some form of oscillating universe, then perhaps we would find that when time runs backwards, matter looks like antimatter and that may balance the books.

Not being a cosmologist or high energy physicist I don't have the wherewithal to analyze these various possibilities, maybe some of them are ridiculous on the face of them or there may be other more obvious or simple solutions, but it seems there are probably ample unknowns out of which to construct hypotheses along these lines.

Given that we could answer the 'where's the antimatter' question, then how would it even be meaningful to say there is 'more than one electron' in the universe vs 'there is one electron/antielectron with a very convolved history'? It would likely be a case of 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.