What are magnetic monopoles and why do physicists search for them?

[woodysooner]

Briefly in our Eng PHYSII class in the text of Halliday and Resnik it talked about physicists looking for magnetic monoploles, can someone explain this and the implications of it.

 

[Gonzolo]

I don't think people are looking for this anymore. Some symetries in classical EM equations would make you predict they exist, in parallele to electric charges (you could quite easily adapt the theory for it). But in the end, a magnetic field can only exist when these electric charges move, and it is created as a dipole.

 

[woodysooner]

what is a monopole though. just a dipole that have no ends lol not sure what it means.

 

[eJavier]

Briefly in our Eng PHYSII class in the text of Halliday and Resnik it talked about physicists looking for magnetic monoploles, can someone explain this and the implications of it.

The fact is that no magnetic monopoles have been ever found (like a point particle being the source of a magnetic field). If there were any magnetic monopole it would explain why is charge quantized.

More info:
http://budoe.bu.edu/~corth/monopole_faq.html

 

[woodysooner]

perfect, where the charge comes from, that what i was looking for. thanx.

 

[pallidin]

The magnetic phenomena, with respect to it's detailed origin and expression, is one of the most least understood aspects of physics.
It does not appear to be an "emmissive" energy or aspect as such, rather a "closed loop" requirement scenario always involving electrical charges. A true mystery.

 

[zefram_c]

Magnetic fields can be treated completely as relativistic corrections to the fields of moving electric charges. Hence there is no reason to assume that magnetic charge (aka monopoles) exists.

 

[meteor]

I have certain knowledge about Dirac's monopole and Kaluza-Klein monopole, but not about Wu-Yang monopole and 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole. What characteristics have the 2 last?

I believe that some form of magnetic monopole must exist. They are the missing piece in Maxwell equations to be perfectly symmetrical, and symmetry has proven to be something very important in science

 

[marlon]

I have certain knowledge about Dirac's monopole and Kaluza-Klein monopole, but not about Wu-Yang monopole and 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole. What characteristics have the 2 last?

I believe that some form of magnetic monopole must exist. They are the missing piece in Maxwell equations to be perfectly symmetrical, and symmetry has proven to be something very important in science

The t'Hooft monopole comes from the dual superconductor model that tries to explain the quarkconfinement. It is formally defined as the point on a manifold where the abelian gauge is not valid. On this point the gauge fields have a singularity and their form (i mean their equation) looks just like the tensor-form of a Dirac string. This thing is an anti-symmetrival tensorfield that represents a magnetic monopole of certain magnetic charge.

regards
marlon

 

[marlon]

Magnetic fields can be treated completely as relativistic corrections to the fields of moving electric charges. Hence there is no reason to assume that magnetic charge (aka monopoles) exists.

You are abusing the work of Einstein when you state this !

You are obviously missing the point here. It is a fact that magnetic fields can be transformed into electric fields when performing a Lorentz boost.

But this means that magnetic as wel as electric fenomena are DUAL. You are able to interchange the two at any point. They are two "different" things used to describe one exact same thing. This is the duality. When you say that magnetic poles are redundant because the can be transformed into electric fields, you may as well say that all electric fenomena are redundant because they can be transformed into magnetic fenomena by using the DUALITY

regards
marlon

 

[kurious]

Are monopoles spin 1/2 particles like electric charges?
Do monopoles have rest mass?

 

[kurious]

A link to some work done on monopoles in 2003:

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cach.../article/news/7/10/2+magnetic+monopoles&hl=en

 

[marlon]

Are monopoles spin 1/2 particles like electric charges?

yes, them monopoles are the dual particles to electric charges. They are fermions of certain magnetic charge...

 

[marlon]

magnetic monopoles circle around the colour electromagnetic field and thus form fluxtubes along which we will get a linear potential between two static quarks. This is a very nice result in order to explain the quarkconfinement based upon the dual abelian higgs model.

regards
marlon