

Artificial Magnetic Monopoles Discovered - nemo1618
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-artificial-magnetic-monopoles.html

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dspeyer
A physicist comments:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fev5e/artificial_m...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fev5e/artificial_magnetic_monopoles_discovered/ca9vit4?context=1)

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gus_massa
A better title could be: "Monopoles _simulated_ in crystal structure".

In crystals it's very useful to describe some arrangements as fictitious
particles.

For example an "electron" inside a crystal is not alone, it's surrounded by a
perturbation of the nearby electrons. So the effective mass (mass * ) of an
"electron" inside a crystal is different from the mass of a free electron in
vacuum. The mass can even be negative! It's easy to understand this negative
mass using an algebraic trick and describing this object as a particle called
"hole" with a positive effective mass and a positive charge.

Another example is the perturbations of the crystalline lattice (the movements
of the atoms that compose the crystal), they are called "phonons" and in a lot
of ways they behave like real particles. For example the correct method to
understand conductivity at small temperature is to analyze how the "phonons"
can "bounce" against the "electrons" and "holes".

So, the result in this article could be useful to test what could happen if we
even find a real monopole, but it's not a real monopole and it gives no cue
about a possible method to create a real monopole.

Another article that describes a similar effect, but it's more clear about the
difference between a real monopole and the result of their experiment: "Point-
like defects in a quantum fluid behave like magnetic monopoles" :
[http://phys.org/news/2012-09-point-like-defects-quantum-
flui...](http://phys.org/news/2012-09-point-like-defects-quantum-fluid-
magnetic.html)

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dictus
Amazing that so many phenomena that were expected to turn up at colliders, (if
they were to turn up at all) eg Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, are
being discovered in condensed matter systems.

Which makes some sense, I suppose. After all, spontaneous symmetry breaking,
sometimes called the Higgs mechanism, was first observed in superconductors,
and described by BCS.

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geuis
I have a suspicion this is very important in the long run. Time will tell.

