Dr Wills and Professors McMorrow, Bramwell and Aeppli collect their award.
Research that proves the existence of atom-sized 'magnetic charges' that behave and interact just like electric charges has been awarded the prize for 'Research Project of the Year' at the 2010 Times Higher Education Awards. The project, which was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), demonstrates a perfect symmetry between electricity and magnetism - a phenomenon dubbed 'magnetricity' by the team from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, which included Dr Andrew Wills and Professors Gabriel Aeppli, Steve Bramwell and Des McMorrow. Magnetic poles usually occur in inseparable north-south pairs. Discrete, separable poles called monopoles have been postulated since 1894 but they hadn?t been observed until the LCN team detected them in special crystals known as spin ice. These crystals are made up of pyramids of charged atoms, or ions, arranged in such a way that when cooled to exceptionally low temperatures, the materials show tiny, discrete packets of magnetic charge. The team was able to use magnetic fields to make the monopoles flow in a similar way to electrons in an electric current. The current was detected by observing the behaviour of subatomic particles called muons created at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Isis facility in Oxfordshire.
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