1. Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3NP, UK
2. Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, 01187 Dresden, Germany
3. PCTP and Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

Correspondence to: C. Castelnovo¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to C.C. (Email: castel@physics.ox.ac.uk).

Electrically charged particles, such as the electron, are ubiquitous. In contrast, no elementary particles with a net magnetic charge have ever been observed, despite intensive and prolonged searches (see ref. 1 for example). We pursue an alternative strategy, namely that of realizing them not as elementary but rather as emergent particles—that is, as manifestations of the correlations present in a strongly interacting many-body system. The most prominent examples of emergent quasiparticles are the ones with fractional electric charge e/3 in quantum Hall physics². Here we propose that magnetic monopoles emerge in a class of exotic magnets known collectively as spin ice^{3, 4, 5}: the dipole moment of the underlying electronic degrees of freedom fractionalises into monopoles. This would account for a mysterious phase transition observed experimentally in spin ice in a magnetic field^{6, 7}, which is a liquid–gas transition of the magnetic monopoles. These monopoles can also be detected by other means, for example, in an experiment modelled after the Stanford magnetic monopole search⁸.

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