What is synthetic magnetism? I was reading about synthetic magnetism and wanted to confirm if my understanding is correct.
What I understand is that Synthetic magnetism is just a fancy name of a method to make a charge neutral particle act like it is in a magnetic field. 
A charged particle in a magnetic field acquires a geometric phase, so a neutral particle if by any method is able to acquire this geometric phase, then that method is said to create a synthetic magnetic field. 
 A: Yes more or less you description is correct. Any artificial methods or natural existing quasiparticles  (i.e. Spin Ice) that emulate a Dirac Monopole fall under this category. Of course these synthetic monopoles are never completely isolated, having a very short Dirac String attached to an corresponding antimonopole (i.e. monopole of relative opposite magnetic polarity) thus are really not natural magnetic monopoles but instead very loosely correlated magnetic dipoles and sometimes referred as "Strongly correlated electron systems".
Natural occurring isolated (i.e. with an infinite Dirac String) magnetic monopoles have not been discovered yet today and many doubt their existence. I myself believe that magnetism and magnetic field is purely a dipole phenomenon and therefore isolated magnetic charge can not exist in nature and even if there is such a thing it would have nothing magnetic and produce no magnetic field around it instead an electric charge like an electron which is a monopole creates a electric field and potential around it even if its completely isolated.
