Nearly 85 years after pioneering theoretical physicist Paul Dirac predicted the possibility of their existence, an international collaboration led by Amherst College Physics Professor David S. Hall '91 and Aalto University (Finland) Academy Research Fellow Mikko Möttönen has created, identified and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles (http://phys.org/news/2014-01-physicists-synthetic-magnetic-monopole-years.html) in Hall's laboratory on the Amherst campus.
The groundbreaking accomplishment paves the way for the detection of the particles in nature, which would be a revolutionary development comparable to the discovery of the electron." That's quite a step beyond detecting monopoles (http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/04/1226227/overwhelming-evidence-for-magnetic-monopoles); the Nature abstract (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/full/nature12954.html) is online, but the full paper is paywalled.
