"Overwhelming" Evidence For Magnetic Monopoles

Thorfinn.au sends along big physics news: magnetic monopoles have been detected at low temperatures in "Dirac strings" within a single crystal of Dysprosium Titanate. Two papers are being published today in the journal Science and two more on arXiv.org, as yet unpublished, provide further evidence. "Theoretical work had shown that monopoles probably exist, and they have been measured indirectly. But the Science papers are the first direct experiments to record the monopole's effects on the spin-ice material. The papers use neutrons to detect atoms in the crystal aligned into long daisy chains. These daisy chains tie each north and south monopole together. Known as 'Dirac strings,' the chains, as well as the existence of monopoles, were predicted in the 1930s by the British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Heat measurements in one paper also support the monopole argument. The two, as yet unpublished, papers on arXiv add to the evidence. The first provides additional observations, and the second uses a new technique to determine the magnetic charge of each monopole to be 4.6x10-13 joules per tesla metre. All together, the evidence for magnetic monopoles 'is now overwhelming,' says Steve Bramwell, a materials scientist at University College London and author on one of the Science papers and one of the arXiv papers."

Comments

Monopoles are not illegal

[jollyreaper]

It's only against the law to use your monopole to extort the market.

Re:Not really useful

[noidentity]

They come in "pairs" huh. Sounds like the N S of a regular old fashioned magnet to me. If they could be separated ever then they really would be monopoles but otherwise how can you be sure its not just a regular magnet thats too small a scale to detect the flux coming from every angle around it?

Damn! Anonymous Coward has thought of something none of the scientists have even considered. Give this guy a research position ASAP.

pepetium mobiles??

[psy0rz]

is it possible to create pepetium mobiles now? ;) most of the the 'free energy' designs are based around non-existing monopoles, and tricks to 'emulate' monopoles.

Woo!

[RenHoek]

Isn't this just in time for the new season of the show Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon is on an expedition to find magnetic monopoles? :)

Bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

All my coins are shaped like mobius strips.

"small crystals about the size of an ear plug."

[olsmeister]

That tells me nothing. How many beard seconds is that?

Re:WTF..

[Rogerborg]

I'm glad you provided the episode number, because the description didn't narrow it down much.