Elusive magnetic monopoles — regions of lone north or south magnetic charge — have recently been detected in very cold 'spin ices', a class of tetrahedral crystals. Now Will Branford and his colleagues at Imperial College London have created monopoles at room temperature, and imaged them directly.
The team arranged cobalt nanorods into a honeycomb lattice on silicon to form a two-dimensional analogue of the spin-ice structure. By applying magnetic fields they disrupted the bars' magnetic alignments, so that regions of north or south magnetic charge were trapped at points where three bars met.
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Physics: Monopoles on demand. Nature 464, 960–961 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464960f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/464960f
