I know just enough to know that this is big news. What does it actually mean for physicists? Is this a major revision of the Standard Model?
Whoa! They actually found monopoles?!
I don’t quite remember what the big deal was- something about how monopoles were around at the time of the big bang. But I’m pretty sure it’s a big boost for some theory or other.
Actually, no. The monopole is predicted by a couple of models out right now, so it only serves to prove that they work. Its pretty much one of the sure things to exist.
Now as to finding one… where did you hear that?
cite?
Betcha it just turns out to be some condensed matter phenomenon that acts like a monopole at the right scales.
Cool.
(Sorry, i took too long reading the article before posting the link…)
Glancing at the arXiv paper, I think I’m correct. It’s an emergent ‘quasi-particle’ of some exotic matter state, not a real magnetic monopoled with Div(B)=0. The Science article is being misleading as hell mentioning it along with Dirac’s theory.
Still a cool result, can’t wait to be the first house on my block to have my lights wired to run off “magtricity”
Thanks SmackFu! I swear I put that link in the OP. :smack:
NOT the elementary particles predicted by some particle physics theories; more like the material in question has internal dipoles long and skinny enough that the ends act like quasi-monopoles. Still interesting though.
While it’s correct that Dirac’s derivation of monopoles involved long, skinny flux tubes, what the article doesn’t mention is that to get a true monopole out of that, you need to mangle the topology of spacetime in such a way that you take the tube itself out of the Universe, which the researchers here have not done (and I’d be really impressed if they did).
As my old advisor used to say, “We know that monopoles exist. But there might be a very small number of them, like zero.”.
Would feeding one end of that tube into your handy dandy lab produced black hole do the trick ? 
No, but if you can produce black holes in the lab, it’s probably not too big a step after that to produce some that have a magnetic charge in the first place. Magnetically-charged black holes are the monopoles that my advisor knew exist.
You may enjoy this video courtesy of TED talks then, where they powered a TV without a cord or battery via a magnetic field.
So how exactly is the end of a dipole tube a monopole? On the other end of the tube you’ll find the opposite pole…
With a true monopole, you could draw a closed surface around it such that the magnetic field lines that pass through the surface are always going outwards. With these pseudo-monopoles, if you draw a closed surface around one of the ends of the tube, the magnetic field lines are always going outwards, except for one little area where the tube is where there are a whole bunch of lines going inwards. So if you look anywhere except at the tube itself, it looks a lot like a monopole, but if you look at the tube, it looks completely unlike one.
That’s quite a distinction. Monopoles always struck me as a preposterous idea, although I am not a physicist. Are all monopoles a variation on this theme, with the other pole being somehow hidden in another dimension? Or are true monopoles theorized?
True monopoles have definitely been theorized in many ways. I’m still not convinced either way about this result yet.