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2 Attempts to find monopoles 3 Theory 4 Prospective practical implications 5 See also 6 External links |
When a magnet, i.e., an object conventionally described as having a north and a south pole, is cut in half across the axis joining those "poles", the resulting pieces are each a normal (smaller) magnet with its own north and south pole, rather than a separate north pole and south pole. Since all known forms of magnetic phenomena involve the motion of electrically charged particles, and since no theory suggests that "pole" is, in that context, a thing rather than a convenient fiction, it may well be that nothing that could be called a magnetic monopole exists or ever did or could.
A hypothetical isolated magnetic pole is called a magnetic monopole; it has been theorized that such things might exist in the form of tiny particles similar to electrons or protons, forming from topological defects in a similar manner to cosmic strings, but no such particles have ever been found.
A number of attempts have been made to detect magnetic monopoles, ranging from simple experiments with large coils of wire attempting to catch passing monopoles to experiments involving the analysis of collisions in particle accelerators. Although there have been tantalizing events recorded, none of these experiments have produced reproducible evidence for the existence of magnetic monopoles.
There are a number of possible explanations for these results:
In particle theory, a magnetic monopole arises from a topological glitch in the vacuum configuration of gauge fields in a Grand Unified Theory or other gauge unification scenario. The length scale over which this special vacuum configuration exists is called the correlation length of the system. A correlation length cannot be larger than causality would allow, therefore the correlation length for making magnetic monopoles must be at least as big as the horizon size determined by the metric of the expanding Universe.
According to that logic, there should be at least one magnetic monopole per horizon volume as it was when the symmetry breaking took place.
This creates a problem, because it predicts that the monopole density today should be about 1011 times the critical density of our Universe, according to the Big Bang model. But so far, physicists have been unable to find even one. Also, the Universe appears to be close to its critical density - for all matter combined.
Standard Big Bang cosmology suggests that monopoles should be plentiful, and the failure to find magnetic monopoles is one of the main problems that led to the creation of cosmic inflation theory. In inflation, the visible universe was much smaller in the period before inflation, and despite the very short time before inflation, it would have been small enough for the whole visible universe to have been within the horizon, and thus not requiring many monopoles. At the moment, versions of inflation seem to be the most likely cosmological theories.
The idea of magnetic monopoles existing is an appealing one, in light of the very natural and elegant way they would fit into a number of theories that physicists find promising. For example, Paul Dirac's conclusion (related to the Aharonov-Bohm effect) that the existence of a magnetic monopole implies that both electric and magnetic charge are quantized is unquestioned.
If such monopoles could actually exist, they might cause an unprecedented revolution in electrical engineering. For instance, if one could replace the iron core of a transformer with a core of the same design but containing free magnetic monopoles (i.e. with a 'magnetic conductor'), such a transformer could trade off voltage and current for DC power applications, as conventional transfomers do with AC.
Background
Magnets exert forces on one another; similarly to electric charges, like poles will repel each other and unlike poles will attract. Experimentally, magnetic poles have so far been found only in inseparable north-south pairs.Attempts to find monopoles
Theory
Prospective practical implications
See also
External links