Moving Monopoles Caught on Camera

For decades, researchers have been searching for magnetic monopoles -- isolated magnetic charges, which can move around freely in the same way as electrical charges. Magnetic poles normally only occur in pairs. Now a team of researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland and University College Dublin has managed to create monopoles in the form of quasiparticles in an assembly of nanoscale magnets and to observe how they move using a microscope at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) to make the magnetic structures visible.