[NewCandle] Image magnetic monopole charge

[Nick Reiter]

Hello all,

Short update here on Bi2Te3 and monopoles...

On Tuesday, I made up a slug of Bi2Te3:Sn from calculated masses of Bi, Te, and Sn.  I didn't have a real quartz diffusion ampoule for reacting, so I let the reaction occur in a SiC crucible, at 650C for 1 hour, under a rough nitrogen purge.  Far from ideal.  Still, I shaved off the dross side when done, polished the surfaces slightly, and took some EDS of a couple different spots.  It looked surprisingly good, Bi to Te ratio, although the Sn content is a little uncertain, being a desired target below 15 anyway.  But it did look like it had reacted and diffused.

The slug is round, about 2cm across and .7cm high.

With a 4 point probe, as well as an ohm-meter, it was clear to see this is not an insulating material.  As I figured, its a metalloid, I would guess maybe .5 ohm-cm at most.  Conductive.

Last night, I hauled out my LOHET chip gaussmeter, which is decent in the fractional gauss range at least.  I rigged up a little cardboard stand, with an aluminum foil square taped to it.  The square was connected to my handy dandy Emco potted HV power supply, which delivers +12kV when you put a 9 volt battery to it.

I placed the slug on the foil square, thus letting me just charge the whole mass surface.

The LOHET chip was well behaved, and I ran a couple null trials first, without the slug, just to see if the high e field would zap anything or give a reading.  It did not.  SO I placed the slug on the foil and tried it.

No indications of any magnetic field.  I tried a couple of angles and directions, getting the chip as close as about .5cm.  Nope, nothing.

Who knows.  I will continue to play with it - trying some current through the slug, on my balance, things like that.  Obviously another caveat is that it wasn't high enough quality or diffused well enough, etc.  I do need to make a slug under better conditions.

Or it may well be that the hypothesis of formation of image monopoles is incomplete or incorrect after all.

Thats for now, though...

n