Magnetic Monopole Noise
Magnetic monopoles are highly elusive elementary particles exhibiting quantised magnetic charge. The prospect for studying them has brightened in recent years with the theoretical realisation that, in certain classes of magnetic insulators, the thermally excited states exhibit all the characteristics of magnetic monopoles. Specifically, recent theories predicted that these magnetic insulators should spontaneously generate wildly and randomly fluctuating magnetic fields as the monopoles move around, but with a magnitude near one billionth of the Earth's field. Using an exquisitely sensitive magnetic-field-noise spectrometer based on a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), we detected from crystals of Dy2Ti2O7 virtually all the predicted features of the magnetic noise coming from a dense fluid of magnetic monopoles. Extraordinarily, because this magnetic monopole noise occurs in the frequency range below 20kHz, when amplified by the SQUID it is actually audible to humans as exemplified in this video clip.
Published Article - Nature 571, 234 - July 2019