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Spin ice

A plasma of magnetic monopoles

Elementary excitations in certain rare-earth titanates emulate the behaviour of a gas of magnetic point charges. Such magnetic monopoles should respond to a magnetic-field pulse exactly as a partially ionized plasma does to an electric-field pulse. This analogy has now been verified.

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Figure 1: Creation of free and bound charges in a generic dipole system.

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Correspondence to Michael Bonitz.

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Bonitz, M. A plasma of magnetic monopoles. Nature Phys 7, 192–194 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1935

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