Maybe I misinterpreted this reasearch when I first saw it reported a couple weeks ago. Seems to me that they haven't created monopoles at all. They've just created a material/structure that allows them to move around the two poles of a dipole arbitrarily within the material. This is consistent with the idea that you can cut magnets into pieces and/or combine them in various ways but you always end up with a dipole.
More broadly, am I the only one who reads this stuff and thinks to themselves "based on what I was taught about what magnetic fields are and how they relate to electric fields, not only is it impossible for monopoles to exist, but it's not even really a meaningful concept."
The following is not quite right, but I think it will help the layman: Basically, electric fields can be thought of as originating at a charged particle and terminating at a particle with opposite charge. Magnetic fields don't originate and terminate at magnetic poles like that. They are better thought of as circulating between the poles (most often in a toroidal shape). For example, the typical way the Earth's magnetic field is drawn is field lines pointing out of the north pole, reaching out of the atmosphere and bending all the way around to re-enter the south pole, but then continuing through the center of the Earth to emerge again from the north pole.
In fact, magnetic poles themselves are not objects, the way charged particles are. It is possible to create a magnetic field using a torus, for example, such that the axis along which the poles would be thought of as being located is actually the empty space in the middle.
