Artificial Magnetic Monopoles Discovered

A physicist comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fev5e/artificial_m...

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...

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.

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