I won't post all the articles, but I'll give you a few links. They are kind of a long read.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163725.htmMagnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time
ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material.
Results of their research are being published in the journal Science.
Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However there are several theories that predict the existence of monopoles. Among others, in 1931 the physicist Paul Dirac was led by his calculations to the conclusion that magnetic monopoles can exist at the end of tubes called Dirac strings that carry magnetic field. Until now they have remained undetected.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17740-hot-on-the-trails-of-the-mysterious-monopole.htmlWe have moved one step closer to finding the mysterious monopoleMovie Camera a magnetic pole without its opposite, which has long eluded physicists. Two laboratory experiments using strange stuff called spin ice have provided the best evidence yet that monopoles really are out there.
Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Paul Dirac said it must be possible to separate the north and south poles of a magnet to give them a separate existence. But despite decades of searching moon dust, the debris from particle collisions and cosmic radiation for traces of a monopole, not one has been found.
Spin ice is a kind of crystalline material with essentially the same atomic arrangements as water ice. Last year, researchers demonstrated that certain states of spin ice would create monopoles that rove about the crystal. The monopoles would be seen as disturbances moving through the spins of atoms within the crystal.
Now two separate groups claim to have seen just that.
Tom Fennell and his colleagues at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble, France, fired a beam of neutrons at a spin ice crystal to investigate how the crystals affected the neutrons' energy. They chilled the crystal to near-zero Kelvin almost as cold as it is theoretically possible to get. The results implied that when the temperature of the crystal rose to around 1 kelvin magnetic monopoles were being formed within it.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Morris of the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy in Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues watched how neutrons scattered off a spin ice crystal in a changing magnetic field. The magnetisation of the particles within the crystals fell into alignment along trails through the crystal, suggesting that the magnetic field was pulling the monopoles apart. These trails are known as "Dirac strings", because Dirac predicted that cosmic monopoles would have just such a connection between them.
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Things like this is just cool as hell.
Stephen
Topic: Magnetic Monopoles in the news this week. (Read 1475 times)