Copasetic Flow

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...

William Fairbank might be most famous for experimentally demonstrating that magnetic flux is quantized[1].  In 1961 he published the results of an experiment that exposed very small cylinders of superconducting tin to a magnetic field and then measured the magnetic flux trapped by the cylinder after the applied magnetic field was turned off.  For more detail on why the flux was trapped, see [2].  He arrived at the following graph of trapped flux vs. applied field strength. (picture 1) The data points are clustered around magnetic flux levels on the y axis that correspond to the values predicted for the magnitude of quantized magnetic flux.  The apparatus for the experiment is similar in several ways to the apparatus for the fractional charge experiment I mentioned yesterday [3].  A superconductor was exposed to an external magnetic field and results were analyzed by measuring properties of an induced vibration of the superconductor through a magnetometer...