FORGET the idea that magnets must always have north and south poles. An experiment led by a University of Alberta researcher at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Switzerland, could dramatically change our concepts of basic physics, revolutionise our understanding of the universe and may even lead to technologies in future generations that, right now, exist only in science fiction.
Professor James Pinfold is leading an international team of physicists who will use ultra-high energy proton collisions.
The protons will move at very near the speed of light in search for a hypothetical particle called the magnetic monopole.
Conventional understanding of magnets is that they must have north and south poles. That is what we are taught at school.
And yet, in 1930, it was shown that a subatomic particle with just a single magnetic pole could exist.
As a result, several modern theories of physics are built on the theoretical existence of magnetic monopoles.
In 2009, researchers in France and Germany reported the observation of certain states of “spin ice”, a kind of crystalline material with essentially the same atomic arrangements as water ice that would create monopole-like particles.
But Prof Pinfold says these should not be confused with the “real thing” being hunted for at CERN.
At CERN, his team will use the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator 27km in circumference, to search for magnetic monopoles in the shrapnel-like debris produced by colliding protons.
Such proton collisions are predicted to create unprecedented energy – 14million electron volts.
The tiny fireballs created in the impact will duplicate the energy produced just after the Big Bang, the event that created the universe.
For more information, see Jim Pinfold’s MoEDAL Experiment movie and CERN Experiment collaboration at
http://web
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pinfold/MoEDAL_site/ Welcome.html