Magnetic monopoles in spin ice

Electrically charged particles, such as the electron, are ubiquitous. In contrast, no elementary particles with a net magnetic charge have ever been observed, despite intensive and prolonged searches ( see ref. 1 for example). We pursue an alternative strategy, namely that of realizing them not as elementary but rather as emergent particles - that is, as manifestations of the correlations present in a strongly interacting many- body system. The most prominent examples of emergent quasiparticles are the ones with fractional electric charge e/3 in quantum Hall physics(2). Here we propose that magnetic monopoles emerge in a class of exotic magnets known collectively as spin ice(3-5): the dipole moment of the underlying electronic degrees of freedom fractionalises into monopoles. This would account for a mysterious phase transition observed experimentally in spin ice in a magnetic field(6,7), which is a liquid - gas transition of the magnetic monopoles. These monopoles can also be detected by other means, for example, in an experiment modelled after the Stanford magnetic monopole search(8).