Building on his own previous research, Amherst College professor David S. Hall and a team of international collaborators have experimentally identified a pointlike monopole in a quantum field for the first time. The discovery, announced this week, gives scientists further insight into the elusive monopole magnet, an elementary particle that researchers believe exists but have not yet seen in nature.
The development -- explored in a paper published in Science -- is a remarkable step forward in quantum research. A better understanding of the structure of monopoles and other topological entities is very valuable to scientists, in part because they appear in the models describing the first moments of the universe's existence and affect the properties of many different materials, such as metals.
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