Searching for Magnetic Monopoles with Earth’s Magnetic Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Magnetic monopoles have long been predicted in theory and could exist as a stable object in our Universe. As they move around in galaxies, magnetic monopoles could be captured by astrophysical objects like stars and planets. Here, we provide a novel method to search for magnetic monopoles by detecting the monopole moment of Earth's magnetic field. Using over six years of public geomagnetic field data obtained by the Swarm satellites, we apply Gauss's law to measure the total magnetic flux, which is proportional to the total magnetic charge inside Earth. To account for the secular variation of satellite altitudes, we define an altitude-rescaled magnetic flux to reduce the dominant magnetic dipole contribution. The measured magnetic flux is consistent with the existing magnetic field model that does not contain a monopole moment term. We therefore set an upper limit on the magnetic field strength at Earth's surface from magnetic monopoles to be |B_{m}|<0.13 nT at 95% confidence level, which is less than 2×10^{-6} of Earth's magnetic field strength. This constrains the abundance of magnetically charged objects, including magnetic black holes with large magnetic charges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".