Chiral Magnetic Effect Generates Quantum Current

Separating left- and right-handed particles in a semi-metallic material produces anomalously high conductivity

 

Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a new way to generate very low-resistance electric current in a new class of materials. The discovery, which relies on the separation of right- and left-"handed" particles, points to a range of potential applications in energy, quantum computing, and medical imaging, and possibly even a new mechanism for inducing superconductivity—the ability of some materials to carry current with no energy loss. 

The material the scientists worked with, zirconium pentatelluride, has a surprising trait: When placed in parallel electric and magnetic fields, it responds with an imbalance in the number of right- and left-handed particles—a chiral imbalance. That imbalance pushes oppositely charged particles in opposite directions to create a powerful electric current. 

This "chiral magnetic effect" had long been predicted theoretically, but never observed definitively in a materials science laboratory at the time this work was done. 

"The resistance of this material drops as the magnetic field strength increases, which could open up a completely different route toward achieving something like superconductivity." — Brookhaven Lab/Stony Brook University nuclear physics theorist Dmitri Kharzeev

In fact, when physicists in Brookhaven's Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Department (CMP&MS) first measured the significant drop in electrical resistance, and the accompanying dramatic increase in conductivity, they were quite surprised. "We didn't know this large magnitude of 'negative magnetoresistance' was possible," said Qiang Li, a physicist and head of the advanced energy materials group in the department and a co-author on a paper describing these results just published in the journal Nature Physics. But after teaming up with Dmitri Kharzeev, the head of the RIKEN-BNL theory group at Brookhaven and a professor at Stony Brook, the scientists had an explanation. 

Kharzeev had explored similar behavior of subatomic particles in the magnetic fields created in collisions at the Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility where nuclear physicists explore the fundamental building blocks of matter. He suggested that in both the RHIC collisions and zirconium pentatelluride, the separation of charges could be triggered by a chiral imbalance.

To test the idea, they compared their measurements with the mathematical predictions of how powerful the increase in conductivity should be with increasing magnetic field strength. 

"We looked at the data and we said, 'Gee, that's it!' We tested six different samples and confirmed that no matter how you do it, it's there as long as the magnetic field is parallel to the electrical current. That's the smoking gun," Li said. 

Going Chiral

 

Right- or left-handed chirality is determined by whether a particle's spin is aligned with or against its direction of motion. In order for chirality to be definitively established, particles have to behave as if they are nearly massless and able to move as such in all three spatial directions. 

While free-flowing nearly massless particles are commonly found in the quark-gluon plasma created at RHIC, this was not expected to occur in condensed matter. However, in some recently discovered materials, including "Dirac semimetals"—named for the physicist who wrote the equations to describe fast-moving electrons—nearly massless "quasiparticle" versions of electrons (and positively charged "holes") propagate through the crystal in this free manner. 

Some aspects of this phenomenon, namely the linear dependence of the particles' energy on their momentum, can be directly measured and visualized using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES).

"On first sight, zirconium pentatelluride did not even look like a 3D material," said Brookhaven physicist Tonica Valla, who performed the measurements with collaborators at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)—two additional DOE Office of Science User Facilities. "It is layered, similar to graphite, so a quasi-2D electronic structure would be more expected. However, as soon as we did the first ARPES measurements, it was clear that the material is a 3D Dirac semimetal."

These results agreed nicely with the ones on conductivity and explained why the chiral magnetic effect was observed in this material.

In the absence of magnetic and electric fields, zirconium pentatelluride has an even split of right- and left- handed quasiparticles. But adding parallel magnetic and electric fields introduces a chiral preference: The magnetic field aligns the spins of the positive and negative particles in opposite directions, and the electric field starts the oppositely charged particles moving—positive particles move with the electric field, negative ones against it. If the two fields are pointing in the same direction, this creates a preference for positive and negative particles that are each moving in a direction aligned with their spin orientation—right-handed chiral particles—but with positive and negative particles moving away from one another. (If the magnetic field orientation is flipped relative to the electric field, the preference would be for left-handed particles, but still with opposite charges separating.) 

"This chiral imbalance gives a big boost to the separation of the oppositely charged particles, which can be connected through an external circuit," Kharzeev said. And once the chiral state is set it's hard to alter, "so very little energy is lost in this chiral current." 

Potential applications

 

The dramatic conductivity and low electrical resistance of Dirac semimetals may be key to potential applications, including "quantum electricity generators" and quantum computing, Li said.

"In a classic generator, the current increases linearly with increasing magnetic field strength, which needs to be changing dynamically. In these materials, current increases much more dramatically in a static magnetic field. You could pull current out of the 'sea' of available quasiparticles continuously. It's a pure quantum behavior," Li said.

Separating the two chiral states could also give a new way of encoding information—analogous to the zeros and ones of computing. And because the chiral state is very stable compared with other electrical states, it's much less prone to interference from external influences, including defects in the material. It could therefore be a more reliable material for quantum computing, Li said.

Kharzeev has some other ideas: "The resistance of this material drops as the magnetic field strength increases, which could open up a completely different route toward achieving something like superconductivity—zero resistance," he said. Right now the materials show at least some reduction in resistance at temperatures as high as 100 Kelvin—in the realm of the best high-temperature superconductors. But there are many different types of Dirac semimetals to experiment with to explore the possibility of higher temperatures or even more dramatic effects. Such low-resistance materials could help overcome a major limit in the speed of microprocessors by reducing the dissipation of current, Kharzeev added. 

"In zirconium pentatelluride and other materials that have since been discovered to have the chiral magnetic effect, an external magnetic field is required to start reducing resistivity," Valla said.

"However, we envision that in some magnetic materials, the electrical current could flow with little or no resistance in a direction parallel with the material's internal magnetic field. That would eliminate the need for external magnetic fields and would offer another avenue for dissipationless transport of electrical current."

Kharzeev and Li are also interested in exploring unusual optical properties in chiral materials. "These materials possess collective excitations in the terahertz frequency range, which could be important for wireless communications and also in imaging techniques that could improve the diagnosis of cancer," Kharzeev said.

Getting back to his nuclear physics roots, Kharzeev added, "The existence of massless quasiparticles that strongly interact makes this material quite similar to the quark-gluon plasma created in collisions at RHIC, where nearly massless quarks strongly interact through the exchange of gluons. So this makes Dirac semimetals an interesting arena for testing some of the ideas proposed in nuclear physics."

"This research illustrates a deep connection between two seemingly unrelated fields, and required contributions from an interdisciplinary team of condensed matter and nuclear physicists," said James Misewich, the Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Science at Brookhaven Lab and a professor of physics at Stony Brook University, who played the central role of introducing the members of this research team to one another. "We're fortunate to have scientists with expertise in these fields here at Brookhaven and nearby Stony Brook University, and the kind of collaborative spirit to make such a project come to fruition," he said.

Brookhaven National Laboratory 

Is the neutrino its own antiparticle?

Almost every particle has an antimatter counterpart: a particle with the same mass but opposite charge, among other qualities.

This seems to be true of neutrinos, tiny particles that are constantly streaming through us. Judging by the particles released when a neutrino interacts with other matter, scientists can tell when they’ve caught a neutrino versus an antineutrino.

But certain characteristics of neutrinos and antineutrinos make scientists wonder: Are they one and the same? Are neutrinos their own antiparticles?

This isn’t unheard of. Gluons and even Higgs bosons are thought to be their own antiparticles. But if scientists discover neutrinos are their own antiparticles, it could be a clue as to where they get their tiny masses—and whether they played a part in the existence of our matter-dominated universe.
Dirac versus Majorana

The idea of the antiparticle came about in 1928 when British physicist Paul Dirac developed what became known as the Dirac equation. His work sought to explain what happened when electrons moved at close to the speed of light. But his calculations resulted in a strange requirement: that electrons sometimes have negative energy.

“When Dirac wrote down his equation, that’s when he learned antiparticles exist,” says André de Gouvêa, a theoretical physicist and professor at Northwestern University. “Antiparticles are a consequence of his equation.”

Physicist Carl Anderson discovered the antimatter partner of the electron that Dirac foresaw in 1932. He called it the positron—a particle like an electron but with a positive charge.

Dirac predicted that, in addition to having opposite charges, antimatter partners should have opposite handedness as well.

A particle is considered right-handed if its spin is in the same direction as its motion. It is considered left-handed if its spin is in the opposite direction.

Dirac’s equation allowed for neutrinos and anti-neutrinos to be different particles, and, as a result, four types of neutrino were possible: left- and right-handed neutrinos and left- and right-handed antineutrinos. But if the neutrinos had no mass, as scientists thought at the time, only left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antineutrinos needed to exist.

In 1937, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana debuted another theory: Neutrinos and antineutrinos are actually the same thing. The Majorana equation described neutrinos that, if they happened to have mass after all, could turn into antineutrinos and then back into neutrinos again. 

The matter-antimatter imbalance

 

Whether neutrino masses were zero remained a mystery until 1998, when the Super-Kamiokande and SNO experiments found they do indeed have very small masses—an achievement recognized with the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. Since then, experiments have cropped up across Asia, Europe and North America searching for hints that the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

The key to finding this evidence is something called lepton number conservation. Scientists consider it a fundamental law of nature that lepton number is conserved, meaning that the number of leptons and anti-leptons involved in an interaction should remain the same before and after the interaction occurs.

Scientists think that, just after the big bang, the universe should have contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The two types of particles should have interacted, gradually canceling one another until nothing but energy was left behind. Somehow, that’s not what happened.

Finding out that lepton number is not conserved would open up a loophole that would allow for the current imbalance between matter and antimatter. And neutrino interactions could be the place to find that loophole.

Neutrinoless double-beta decay

 

Scientists are looking for lepton number violation in a process called double beta decay, says SLAC theorist Alexander Friedland, who specializes in the study of neutrinos.

In its common form, double beta decay is a process in which a nucleus decays into a different nucleus and emits two electrons and two antineutrinos. This balances leptonic matter and antimatter both before and after the decay process, so it conserves lepton number.

If neutrinos are their own antiparticles, it’s possible that the antineutrinos emitted during double beta decay could annihilate one another and disappear, violating lepton number conservation. This is called neutrinoless double beta decay.

Such a process would favor matter over antimatter, creating an imbalance.

“Theoretically it would cause a profound revolution in our understanding of where particles get their mass,” Friedland says. “It would also tell us there has to be some new physics at very, very high energy scales—that there is something new in addition to the Standard Model we know and love.”

It’s possible that neutrinos and antineutrinos are different, and that there are two neutrino and anti-neutrino states, as called for in Dirac’s equation. The two missing states could be so elusive that physicists have yet to spot them.

But spotting evidence of neutrinoless double beta decay would be a sign that Majorana had the right idea instead—neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same.

“These are very difficult experiments,” de Gouvêa says. “They’re similar to dark matter experiments in the sense they have to be done in very quiet environments with very clean detectors and no radioactivity from anything except the nucleus you're trying to study."

Physicists are still evaluating their understanding of the elusive particles.

“There have been so many surprises coming out of neutrino physics,” says Reina Maruyama, a professor at Yale University associated with the CUORE neutrinoless double beta decay experiment. “I think it’s really exciting to think about what we don’t know.”

Fermilab/SLAC

How to spawn an “exceptional ring”

A schematic drawing of how a ring of exceptional points (shown in white) can be spawned from a Dirac point (a dot), and thus change the dispersion from the normal, widely known conical shape into an exotic lantern-like shape
Courtesy of the researchers

Researchers create exotic states that could lead to new kinds of sensors and optical devices.

The Dirac cone, named after British physicist Paul Dirac, started as a concept in particle and high-energy physics and has recently became important in research in condensed matter physics and material science. It has since been found to describe aspects of graphene, a two dimensional form of carbon, suggesting the possibility of applications across various fields.

Now physicists at MIT have found another unusual phenomenon produced by the Dirac cone: It can spawn a phenomenon described as a “ring of exceptional points.” This connects two fields of research in physics and may have applications in building powerful lasers, precise optical sensors, and other devices.

The results are published this week in the journal Nature by MIT postdoc Bo Zhen, Yale University postdoc Chia Wei Hsu, MIT physics professors Marin Soljačić and John Joannopoulos, and five others.

This work represents “the first experimental demonstration of a ring of exceptional points,” Zhen says, and is the first study that relates research in exceptional points with the physical concepts of parity-time symmetry and Dirac cones.

Individual exceptional points are a peculiar phenomenon unique to an unusual class of physical systems that can lead to counterintuitive phenomena. For example, around these points, opaque materials may seem more transparent, and light may be transmitted only in one direction. However, the practical usefulness of these properties is limited by absorption loss introduced in the materials.

A schematic picture showing the conical dispersion of a Dirac cone being deformed into a new hour-glass-like shape due to radiation. Courtesy of the researchers

The MIT team used a nanoengineered material called a photonic crystal to produce the exceptional ring. This new ring of exceptional points is different from those studied by other groups, making it potentially more practical, the researchers say.

“Instead of absorption loss, we adopt a different loss mechanism — radiation loss — which does not affect the device performance,” Zhen says. “In fact, radiation loss is useful and is necessary in devices like lasers.”

This phenomenon could enable creation of new kinds of optical systems with novel features, the MIT team says.

“One important possible application of this work is in creating a more powerful laser system than existing technologies allow,” Soljačić says. To build a more powerful laser requires a bigger lasing area, but that introduces more unwanted “modes” for light, which compete for power, limiting the final output.

“Photonic crystal surface-emitting lasers are a very promising candidate for the next generation of high-quality, high-power compact laser systems,” Soljačić says, “and we estimate we can improve the output power limit of such lasers by a factor of at least 10.”

“Our system could also be used for high-precision detectors for biological or chemical materials, because of its extreme sensitivity,” Hsu says. This improved sensitivity is due to another exotic property of the exceptional points: Their response to perturbations is not linear to the perturbation strength.

Normally, Hsu says, it becomes very difficult to detect a substance when its concentration is low. When the concentration of the target substance is reduced by a million times, the overall signal also decreases by a million times, which can make it too small to detect.

“But at an exceptional point, it’s not linear anymore,” Hsu says, “and the signal goes down by only 1,000 times, providing a much bigger response that can now be detected.”

Demetrios Christodoulides, a professor of optics and photonics at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in this work, says, “This represents the first observation of an exceptional ring in a 2-D crystal associated with a two-dimensional band. The MIT work opens up a number of opportunities … in particular, around exceptional points where systems are known on many occasions to behave in a peculiar fashion.”

The research team also included Yuichi Igarashi of NEC Corp. in Japan and MIT research scientist Ling Lu, postdoc Ido Kaminer, Harvard University graduate student Adi Pick, and Song-Liang Chua at DSO National Laboratory in Singapore. The work was supported, in part, by the Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.

MIT

Scientists discover long-awaited synthetic particle

Researchers have now created and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles under laboratory conditions. These observations lay the foundation for the underlying structure of the natural magnetic monopole – the detection of which would be a revolutionary event comparable to the discovery of the electron. The results were recently published in Nature magazine.

Although predicted over 80 years ago, the fundamentally quantum-mechanical configuration of the monopoles has not previously been observed in any physical system. The reported results demonstrate the structure in an ultracold atomic gas.

“Our achievement opens up amazing avenues for quantum research. It feels incredible to have been a part of such a major breakthrough,” says a delighted Dr. Mikko Möttönen from Aalto University, Finland.

Evidence for magnetic monopoles has been sought in sources as diverse as lunar samples and ancient micas. The multibillion-euro LHC particle accelerator at CERN has also been used in the search – but no magnetic monopoles have been convincingly identified. The discovery of the synthetic monopole provides a stronger foundation for these efforts.

“The creation of a synthetic magnetic monopole should provide us with unprecedented insight into aspects of the natural monopole,” says Prof. David S. Hall from Amherst College, USA. “It's not every day that you get to poke and prod the analogue of an elusive fundamental particle under highly controlled conditions in the laboratory.”, he continues.

“Synthesis of the monopole is the starting point for many new breakthroughs in quantum physics research. In the future, we want to get even a more complete correspondence with the natural magnetic monopole.”, says Dr. Möttönen.

A magnetic monopole is a particle just like an electron, but with a magnetic rather than an electric charge. Some 80 years ago Paul A. M. Dirac, one of the founders of quantum physics, discovered a quantum-mechanical structure allowing the existence of magnetic monopoles. Dirac’s original framework has now been experimentally realized for the first time.

Article in Nature Magazine: “Observation of Dirac monopoles in a synthetic magnetic field”

Figure caption. Artistic illustration of the synthetic magnetic monopole (Heikka Valja)

 

Further information

Mikko Möttönen, docent, Dr. Tech.
Aalto University
Department of Applied Physics and O. V. Lounasmaa Laboratory
QCD Labs
mikko.mottonen*at*aalto.fi
tel. +358 50 594 0950
http://physics.aalto.fi/qcd//

Mikko Möttönen is the leader of the theoretical and computational part of the research. Theoretical ideas and computational modelling was very important for the success of the creation of the monopole. The modelling was carried out using the supercomputers at CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd.

David S. Hall, Professor
Amherst College
Department of Physics
dshall@amherst.edu
tel. +1 413 542 2072
http://www3.amherst.edu/~halllab/

David S. Hall is the leader of the experimental part of the research. The synthetic magnetic monopoles were created in the Physics Laboratories at Amherst College, United States of America.

 

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation,Academy of Finland through its Centres of Excellence Program Computational Nanoscience, and Finnish Doctoral Programme in Computational Sciences.

 

Background information

Magnetic monopole “A magnetic monopole is an isolated magnetic pole, magnetic charge, and a point-like source of magnetic field.” An electron is a point-like particle that carries a so-called elementary electric charge. This means that an electron is an isolated source of an electric field. Can a magnetic field have a similar point-like source? Every one of us has likely held two bar magnets and noticed that their ends either attract or repel one another. The ends of the magnet are referred to as poles and every magnet has one end that is a north pole and one that is a south pole. A magnetic north pole attracts a magnetic south pole, but repels another north pole. In general, opposite poles attract, and identical poles repel. In this respect, magnetism is very much like electricity, which exhibits the same attractive and repulsive behavior involving positive and negative electric charges. When a bar magnet breaks, two smaller bar magnets are created, each with its own north and south pole. You can break each of these smaller magnets in two, and so on, and every resulting magnet has a north pole and a south pole. Even at the atomic level, north and south poles always appear together. One cannot produce in this way a solitary pole, or monopole, that acts as a single point source of the magnetic field. Are there other ways to find magnetic monopoles? As yet, not a single natural magnetic monopole has been verifiably observed. This was initially considered to be a problem, because theoretical models that described the post-Big-Bang period predicted that they should be quite common. However, a special model for the expansion of the universe was developed that can explain the extreme rarity of these particles. According to some theories, the energy content (mass) of a single magnetic monopole is so large that if it were completely used to recharge the battery of an electric car, this vehicle would be able to travel for kilometres with the energy. This explains why magnetic monopoles are probably not likely to occur in a particle accelerator. If the mass of a magnetic monopole really is that large, the energy released from the collision of a negatively and positively charged monopole would be as much as the energy released in the explosion of a kilogram of dynamite! Dirac monopole “A Dirac monopole is a point-like source of a possibly artificial magnetic field that forms at the endpoint of a quantum whirlpool.” In quantum mechanics, an electron is described by a diffuse wave-like object rather than a point-like particle. Paul Dirac was the first person to understand the importance of studying the end points of quantum-mechanical whirlpools within these electron waves. He noticed that when an electron has such a terminating vortex, a magnetic monopole inevitably forms at the end point. A terminating vortex is the defining characteristic of the Dirac monopole. Dirac also noticed that if the universe contains even a single magnetic monopole, it specifies the smallest possible value for an electric charge. All observed charges must be integer multiples of this minimum value; in other words, charge must be quantized. The existence of a monopole would therefore explain the experimental observation that electric charge is quantized. Dirac monopoles are generally analyzed in a fairly simple quantum-mechanical model. Magnetic monopoles have since been studied in more general, so-called unified field theories, in which they could exist in the absence of a terminating vortex. Synthetic magnetic field “A synthetic magnetic field is an artificial field that leads to particle dynamics equivalent to those of an electric charge in a corresponding natural magnetic field.” Electrons are not the only physical systems that can exhibit terminating vortices. Thus a Dirac monopole can also appear in other systems, such as the Bose-Einstein condensate. Rather than being related to the natural magnetic field, this monopole can be associated with a synthetic magnetic field. Importantly, the structure of the monopole is identical to that of a Dirac magnetic monopole. This is why the Dirac monopole observed in the synthetic magnetic field is closer to a natural magnetic monopole than any earlier observation. Spin “Roughly speaking, spin indicates how fast a particle is spinning around its own axis, and the orientation of that axis.” Spin is a magnetic property of many particles, including electrons, protons, neutrons, and even many types of atoms. For example, the electron spin is composed of two basis states: up or down. This describes whether the electron is spinning around its axis in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. A particle with a non-zero spin creates a magnetic field around it. However, this is not a monopole field – it is a so-called dipole field with both north and south magnetic poles, just like a bar magnet. Even this smallest of bar magnets cannot be broken into two separate magnetic monopoles. In fact, bar magnets are composed of countless numbers of small spin dipoles, nearly all of which point in the same direction. Overlapping poles of different sign cancel out the field of each other, and thus the field of an ideal bar magnet looks as if it has magnetic poles only at its ends. Spins tend to align along an externally applied magnetic field, which is the key to the creation of the synthetic magnetic monopole. Synthesis of a monopole “A monopole is created in a Bose–Einstein condensate by using an external magnetic field to guide the spins of the atoms forming the condensate.” In 2009, Aalto University researchers Ville Pietilä and Mikko Möttönen published theoretical results demonstrating a method to create Dirac monopoles in a Bose–Einstein condensate. The idea involves using external magnetic fields to rotate the atomic spins. A Dirac monopole forms in the condensate as a result of the spin rotation. This method was adopted by the researchers in creating the synthetic magnetic monopole. The Dirac monopole forms in the artificial magnetic field of the condensate, not in the physical magnetic field which steers the spin degree of freedom. Thus, a natural magnetic monopole is not needed to create the synthetic monopole.   Caption: Synthesis of a monopole in time, starting from panel a and ending with panel c. The arrows show the direction of the physical magnetic field produced in the laboratory. This magnetic field also directs the internal spin degree of freedom of the Bose–Einstein condensate in the direction of the arrows. The end result is that the condensate begins to move as if it were electrically charged and affected by a magnetic monopole in the position marked by the black circle in the image. Click for the full-resolution image. The Bose–Einstein condensate “A Bose–Einstein condensate behaves like a single giant atom, even though it can contain millions.” A Bose–Einstein condensate is sometimes considered to be the fifth state of matter, in addition to solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. In the condensate, the importance and location of individual atoms becomes vague and the system behaves as if it were a single large atom. The first Bose–Einstein condensates were achieved in 1995, and this work received the Nobel Prize in 2001. “Bose–Einstein condensates provide a window from our world into the quantum wonderland. The more often I peek at it, the more I want to stay there,” says enchanted Dr. Möttönen. Since Bose–Einstein condensates contain many atoms, photographs of them can be taken using technology that is in part similar to that used in ordinary digital cameras. In addition, the condensates can be forced into the desired shape by means of external magnetic fields and laser beams. These properties make condensates a unique tool for developing new phenomena and quantum technologies. In addition to being used with magnetic monopoles, condensates can simulate the properties of various useful materials to the accuracy of a single atom. One of the daydreams of condensate researchers involves finding a solution for the development of superconducting materials that function at room temperature. What in the world is quantum physics? “Quantum physics describes natural phenomena most accurately.” Quantum physics (also quantum mechanics) is a theory developed over the past 100 years that has been observed to describe the reality in more detail than any other model. It is particularly useful for explaining atomic-level phenomena, which is impossible using classical physics. On the other hand, quantum physics reproduces the same results as classical physics on the large scale. In quantum mechanics, an electron can take on wave-like properties, sometimes appearing as an extended object rather than a point particle. It is this property of extension, which is shared with Bose-Einstein condensates, that permits the observation of the quantum whirlpools essential to detecting the effect of the magnetic monopole. Quantum technologies use the laws of quantum physics relieved from classical restrictions to produce practical applications. For example, development of a quantum computer – a potentially super-fast problem solver – is one of the key goals of quantum technologies. A quantum computer would be able to find a solution to certain problems very quickly by using methods that are impossible in the logical framework of a normal computer. “The laws of quantum physics make it possible to take shortcuts. Among other things, this is the basis of the super-fast speed of a quantum computer,” explains Möttönen. Future directions In the future, the research groups will concentrate on more in-depth research into the structure of a synthetic magnetic monopole. They are also interested in the dynamics of monopoles and their interactions with other synthetic particles. One interesting idea involves trying to create a monopole that is not bound to a whirlpool in the same way as is the Dirac monopole. This type of structure could possibly describe a natural magnetic monopole in even more detail. Source: http://sci.aalto.fi/en/current/news/view/2014-01-29/