Abstract
Despite decades-long efforts, magnetic monopoles were never found as elementary particles. Monopoles and associated currents were directly measured in experiments and identified as topological quasiparticle excitations in emergent condensed matter systems. These monopoles and the related electric-magnetic symmetry were restricted to classical electrodynamics, with monopoles behaving as classical particles. Here we show that the electric-magnetic symmetry is most fundamental and extends to full quantum behavior. We demonstrate that at low temperatures magnetic monopoles can form a quantum Bose condensate dual to the charge Cooper pair condensate in superconductors. The monopole Bose condensate manifests as a superinsulating state with infinite resistance, dual to superconductivity. The monopole supercurrents result in the electric analog of the Meissner effect and lead to linear confinement of the Cooper pairs by Polyakov electric strings in analogy to quarks in hadrons.
Highlights
Despite decades-long efforts, magnetic monopoles were never found as elementary particles
The importance of electric-magnetic duality was first realized by Nambu[8], Mandelstam[9], and ’t Hooft[10], who proposed that color confinement in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) can be understood as a dual Meissner effect
We show that magnetic monopole supercurrents result in the direct electric analog of the Meissner effect and lead to linear confinement of the Cooper pairs by Polyakov’s electric strings[14,17,18] in analogy to quarks within hadrons[19]
Summary
Despite decades-long efforts, magnetic monopoles were never found as elementary particles. Monopoles and associated currents were directly measured in experiments and identified as topological quasiparticle excitations in emergent condensed matter systems. Electric-magnetic duality manifestly realizes the symmetry between Cooper pairs, which are Noether charges, and magnetic monopoles, which are topological solitons, and forms the foundation for the superconductor-insulator transition[11] and the appearance of the superinsulating state[12,13,14]. We show that magnetic monopole supercurrents result in the direct electric analog of the Meissner effect and lead to linear confinement of the Cooper pairs by Polyakov’s electric strings[14,17,18] (dual to superconducting vortices) in analogy to quarks within hadrons[19]. The monopole condensate realizes a 3D version of superinsulators, that have been previously observed in 2D superconducting films, and result from quantum tunneling events, or instantons[12,13,14,17,18]
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