Polar OppositesMagnetricity
Electricity's sister!
Currents of magnetricity are born when north poles and south poles split up and move around independently
A team of physicists in England has created magnetic charges isolated north and south magnetic poles and induced them to flow in crystals no bigger than a centimeter across. These moving magnetic charges, which behave almost exactly like electrical charges flowing through batteries and biological systems, could one day be useful in developing "magnetronic" devices though what such devices would do is anybody's guess. In magnets, poles always come in pairs. No matter how many times you cut a magnet in half, down to the atoms themselves, each piece will always have a north and a south a dipole. But the magnetic molecules that make up a crystalline material called spin ice are arranged in triangular pyramids that prevent them from lining up comfortably with all of their poles pointing in the same direction. In an awkward compromise, each pyramid tends to have two magnets pointing inward and two pointing outward. In 2009 Steven Bramwell of the University College of London found that sometimes a molecule squirms and flips. Two poles, a north and a south, are born. The molecule itself stays put, but these ghostly poles, which aren't actually attached to a physical object, can move around independently of each other as chain reactions of flipping molecules carry them from pyramid to pyramid. "Eventually they get so far apart that they lose all memory of each other," says Bramwell. "The dipole splits in half and becomes two monopoles."
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