Pick of the pics A pretty magnetic pattern is pretty surprising
too Against the rules, triplets of magnetic north poles (bright
points) and south poles (dark points) chum together with amazing
regularity on small islands etched in a honeycomb pattern on an
iron surface, using an electron beam. Hartmut Zabel at the Ruhr-
Universität Bochum calls it a new magnetic order. The polarities
are revealed by a magnetic force microscope, and the
20-micrometre scale line tells us that the width of the picture
is about the average thickness of a human hair. Credit: RUB
Who’d have thought it? In kindergarten science you learn that
like magnetic poles repel each other. Yet here we see
energetically unfavourable triplets of poles occurring not just
once or twice by mistake but all across a specially prepared
iron surface, when subjected to a magnetic field. The so-called
“magnetic monopoles” created in this pattern are not to be
confused with hypothetical fundamental particles of that name.
And be wary of attempts to explain