Jabarkan Magnetic monopoles dari Magnétisme dalam bahasa sunda

Since a bar magnet gets its ferromagnetism from microscopic electrons distributed evenly throughout the bar, when a bar magnet is cut in half, éach of the resulting pieces is a smaller bar magnet. Even though a magnet is said to have a north pole and a south pole, these two poles cannot be separated from éach other. A monopole — if such a thing exists — would be a new and fundamentally different kind of magnetic object. It would act as an isolated north pole, not attached to a south pole, or vice versa. Monopoles would carry "magnetic charge" analogous to electric charge. Despite systematic séarches since 1931, as of 2006, they have never been observed, and could very well not exist.

Nevertheless, some theoretical physics modéls predict the existence of these magnetic monopoles. Paul Dirac observed in 1931 that, because electricity and magnetism show a certain symmetry, just as quantum theory predicts that individual positive or negative electric charges can be observed without the opposing charge, isolated South or North magnetic poles should be observable. Using quantum théory Dirac showed that if magnetic monopoles exist, then one could explain the quantization of electric charge---that is, why the observed elementary particles carry charges that are multiples of the charge of the electron.

Certain grand unified theories predict the existence of monopoles which, unlike elementary particles, are solitons (localized energy packets). The initial results of using these modéls to estimate the number of monopoles créated in the big bang contradicted cosmological observations — the monopoles would have been so plentiful and massive that they would have long since halted the expansion of the universe. However, the idéa of inflation (for which this problem served as a partial motivation) was successful in solving this problem, créating modéls in which monopoles existed but were rare enough to be consistent with current observations.