(02-01-2014, 04:13 AM)Dalex Wrote:(02-01-2014, 03:46 AM)crevicecrab Wrote: Of course it isn't a 'OA monopole'. However this is to my knowledge the first experimental confirmation of Dirac's research on the subject- which means that Dirac is right and that we now have a clear model for monopole research and eventually production. I'd say this may be the most significant experimental discovery of 2014.
As of now there have been several attempts to find elementary magnetic monopoles (stuff that magmatter would be made of) all unsuccesful.
While this proves that Dirac was right about properties of monopolic magnetic charge, it does not tell us where to look for it's elementary counterpart (I mean of course range of energies).
As for production. Elementary particles can be produced by colliders such as LHC but to this day none were detected.
These are results from LHC experiment MoEDAL that is looking specificaly for monopoles. Their results seem to prove that there are no monopoles lighter than 3500 Gev. That is pretty constraining.
On an unrelated note none of the particles predicted by SUSY was detected yet either.
Not sure where you got that. The PDG puts a lower limit of 120 GeV on monopole masses.
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2013/reviews/rpp2013-...arches.pdf
We don't have a clear path to making monopoles. What was done was setting up a quantum system which behaved like a monopole. Dirac's predictions were confirmed, which tells us we got the theory right. Note that baryon catalysis was not confirmed, due to limitations of the setup. In essence, you need a real monopole of the correct type to check this.
Likewise, SUSY has a lot of parameter space unreachable by the LHC. The MSSM puts light gauginos in the TeV range, which is just barely accessible.