Making Monopoles

Most of us know that the "electron" is a subatomic particle that has an electric charge. We can manipulate it with electrical forces. Well, Physics has long hypothesized that there should also exist a subatomic particle that has a magnetic charge, say "North".

For decades we have been able to manufacture electrons out of pure energy. The process does not make ONLY electrons, though; it also makes equal numbers of other particles called "positrons". A positron is just like an electron in every way, except that it has a positive electric charge, while an electron has a negative electric charge.

Physicists think that it should be possible to make magnetic monopoles out of pure energy, also. Part of the problem is that we don't have a good idea of just how much energy it would take to make one. AND we would always have to make two of them, a "North" monopole and a "South" monopole, just like we always have to make a positron when we make an electron. It means we need twice-as-much of an unknown amount of energy, heh.

One of the neat things about having electrons and positrons to play with is that we can bash them together and watch them turn into pure energy (much like the energy that went into making them in the first place). What makes it even more fun is that we can accelerate the two particles to high speed first, before they collide, and the total energy that is released will include all the kinetic energy associated with their high speeds.

That fact has allowed particle physics researchers to discover lots of other particles, because when enough energy is available at some point in space, it can spontaneously convert into something other than pure energy. For example, we could make a proton and an anti-proton if the energy of the collision of the electron and the positron was large enough.

The obvious notion is that if the electron and positron have high-enough energy, then when they collide, a pair of magnetic monopoles might be produced.

Well, experiments along those lines have been done, without any success. This Idea is about adding another factor to the experiment, which might convert failure into success.

Let's approach that factor by considering the original discovery that some pure energy can spontaneously convert into an electron and a positron. It turns out that in actual fact, "spontaneous" is not the best word-choice for the description. What acually happened is that a photon of pure energy (a gamma ray photon) happened to pass near the nucleus of an atom of lead. And the nucleus of a lead atom contains 82 protons, every one of them possessing a significant (at close range, anyway) positive electric charge. This high-intensity electric field interacted with the gamma photon, and influenced it to convert into an electron and a positron.

Therefore I propose adding a suitably high-intensity magnetic field to an experiment in which high-energy electrons and positrons are bashed together. We have the technology to create a kind of "burst" magnetic field that is much MUCH stronger than any ordinary steady magnetic field. Look up "explosive compression"; magnetic fields can be squeezed by such events, and they become enormously intense when so squeezed.

We simply need to time an explosive-field-compression event to coincide with the collision of a high-energy electron and positron. And if we get ENOUGH energy out of that collision, we can hope that that extreme magnetic field will interact with it in such a way as to yield a pair of magnetic monopoles. Then we simply repeat until we have all we want.