Re: Can there be such a thing as a 'Monopole' or single pole magnet?

Area: Physics
Posted By: Georg Hager, Grad student Theorie III
Date: Tue Feb 18 08:51:47 1997
Message ID: 855899209.Ph

Dear Alan!

If only we knew! If there were such a thing as a magnetic monopole (or, more generally, magnetic charge), this would mean that several riddles of theoretical physics could be resolved in an instant:

With magnetic charge, the Maxwell Equations governing the behaviour of electromagnetic fields and charges would become extremely symmetric. This would mean that static magnetic fields could be produced by static magnetic charges (just as static electric fields are produced by static electric charges), not only by magnetic dipoles or electric currents.
Dirac has shown that if there existed just a single magnetic monopole in the whole universe, the electric charge would necessarily have to be quantized. Up to now we do not have any satisfactory explanation for the quantization of charge.

Amazingly, one can show quite easily that if the ratio of magnetic to electric charge was the same for every particle, a simple transform of the Maxwell Equations lets the magnetic charges and currents disappear and one ends up with the `usual' equations that everyone knows. In other words, under this condition, magnetic charge does not necessarily have to be observable.

Up to now, the experimental search for magnetic monopoles has been unsuccessful. But we can by no means be sure that they don't exist. To learn more about ongoing experiments, look at the pages of the MACRO Experiment.

Hope that helps,
Georg.

Current Queue | Current Queue for Physics | Physics archives

Return to the MadSci Network