magnetic monopoles

[happyjack27]

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-physicists ... years.html

[AcesHigh]

it´s actually a physical SIMULATION of monopole behavior, right?

[ladajo]

I thought they did it at the quantum level.
Hmm.

[GIThruster]

No, they actually created them in the fridge, much like the growth experiments I do periodically.

What does purple mean?

[happyjack27]

it's a real monopole. a physical manifestation of a dirac string.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_string

And purple means good fortune.

[happyjack27]

full paper: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/397 ... e12954.pdf

[Tom Ligon]

When will I be able to order them online?

Hmmm, in my mind, I'm picturing a tiny little Polywell ....

[Tom Ligon]

Happyjack,

A friend of mine confirms this. He says they are actually dipoles, "net flux is zero", but one pole is really tiny.

[happyjack27]

well a Dirac string IS a dipole, it's just that the poles are separated, so what you get is a monopole and an anti-monopole, much like an electron and a positron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_m ... rac_string

"So that the phase a charged particle gets when going in a loop is the magnetic flux through the loop. When a small solenoid has a magnetic flux, there are interference fringes for charged particles which go around the solenoid, or around different sides of the solenoid, which reveal its presence.

But if all particle charges are integer multiples of e, solenoids with a flux of 2π/e have no interference fringes, because the phase factor for any charged particle is e2πi = 1. Such a solenoid, if thin enough, is quantum-mechanically invisible. If such a solenoid were to carry a flux of 2π/e, when the flux leaked out from one of its ends it would be indistinguishable from a monopole.

Dirac's monopole solution in fact describes an infinitesimal line solenoid ending at a point, and the location of the solenoid is the singular part of the solution, the Dirac string. Dirac strings link monopoles and antimonopoles of opposite magnetic charge, although in Dirac's version, the string just goes off to infinity. The string is unobservable, so you can put it anywhere, and by using two coordinate patches, the field in each patch can be made nonsingular by sliding the string to where it cannot be seen."

so yeah, net flux, when you include both ends of the string, is zero. maxwell's equations hold. but what you get is effectively a pair of monopoles.