磁单极子进展概述

Summarization of the progress in magnetic monopole

自磁单极子概念被狄拉克提出以来,不管是理论还是实验物理学家都一直在努力寻找,但迄今仍然没能找到它们存在的确凿证据.最近,一些凝聚态物理学家声称在动量空间以及自旋冰材料中找到了磁单极子存在的有力证据,并通过磁单极子的集体激发行为解释了一些新颖的物理现象.这使得磁单极子艰难的探索之路出现了一丝新的曙光.作为电动力学教学内容的补充,本文拟把磁单极子的最新进展做一个概述,让大学生对此有一个全面的认识,从而激发他们学习和科研的兴趣.

Since Dirac proposed the concept of magnetic monopole, both the experimental and the theoretical physicists have made great efforts to search for such fantastic particles, but have not found any firm evidence for their existence. Recently, some condensed matter physicists claimed that they had found some convincing evidence of the existence of them in momentum space and spin ice. Furthermore, they interpreted some novel phenomena by the collective behavior of magnetic monopoles. This casts a flash of hope on the difficult road searching for such charming particles. As a supplement of teaching materials, we want to give a summarization of the recently progress in magnetic monopole to provide a whole picture of the magnetic monopoles and to stimulate the interesting of the readers.