Why two poles of the magnet?

Almost all of us are familiar with magnets in childhood. It was great fun to take the magnet out of the toy car. And the magnets that could be bought separately, I didn’t want to keep them. When we grow up, we understand that the magnet is very strange!

We know that a magnet has two poles. North and South Pole. Attracts iron and other things. However, the north pole of one bar magnet attracts the south pole of another bar magnet. But when the north pole is brought near the north pole, both the magnets are thrown in both directions. The strange thing is that if you cut or break a bar magnet in half, none of its poles will move. Instead, there are two new magnets, each with two poles!

Growing up, we learned that magnets only point north-south. East-West cannot be reversed. This is because the center of the earth is a magnet! That’s why the north pole of Earth’s geomagnet attracts the south pole of our toy magnets. And the north pole of our magnet attracts the south pole of the geomagnet. Magnets work great for this feature. We now know that not only toy cars, but also real cars or refrigerators have magnets. Even important medical tests such as MRI are performed using this magnetic property.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida, USA. The director of this laboratory is Greg Boebinger. He says, ‘Magnets are one of the mysteries of physics. People have been using these magnets for thousands of years. But scientists are still learning new information about it.

This magnet has so many properties, the two poles of which are at the root – how are these poles made? We know that conducting electricity through iron shows its magnetism. Again the south pole of our magnet is attracted to the north pole of the geomagnet. But what is this magnet thing? How are the poles formed?

The most basic answer to this question is that the material that the magnet is made of contains atoms of that material. And there are electrons inside the atom. The real magic is these electrons.

At the center of the atom is the positively charged nucleus. And it is surrounded by one or more negatively charged electrons. Each electron creates a tiny magnetic field for its charge. Scientists call this property of electrons spin. If the poles of several of these microscopic magnetic fields are in the same direction, then the material becomes a magnet.

So the electron spin theory is an abstract concept. The name is ‘spin’, which is Bengali for rotation – so many people think that electron spin means it rotates. Not really. In fact, when a charged object rotates, a magnetic field is created around it. Scientists have measured such magnetic fields around electrons. They call the property of creating this magnetic field ‘spin’. Because, reversing the direction of the spin also reverses the pole of the magnetic field.

Electrons are usually paired. As a result the spin of one cancels the opposite spin of the other. As a result, the total magnetization value of any atom becomes zero. But this does not happen in some materials like iron. Let’s talk about iron. In iron atoms, the electrons are arranged around the nucleus in such a way that there is an odd electron in each atom. As a result, a microscopic magnetic field is created in each iron atom. That is why there is a religion of iron magnets.

In non-magnetic materials, the magnetic fields of each atom point in different directions. Not in any particular direction. The results cancel each other out in most cases, so eventually the material no longer exhibits magnetism. However, they can be turned in the same direction by conducting electricity or under the influence of a magnetic field. Then magnetism is seen in them too.

Now let’s talk about an interesting topic. Scientists have been searching for ‘magnetic monopoles’ for a long time. It can be called a stone of physics. But no trace of it has been found yet. Strangely, electrons and protons are electrically monopoles—that is, uniformly charged. Either negative or positive. As electrons are only negative. But in the magnetism created by electrons and other elementary particles again both poles are seen. And since these are elementary particles, they cannot be broken down. Physicists have stopped here. They no longer know whether the existence of unipolar magnets is really possible. Magnetism is therefore still a mystery. We still don’t know how to solve the mystery.