I saw a video on magnetic monopoles. In it the presenter spoke about quantised charges and said there is no reason we can’t have fractional charges. Can I ask why did he make that statement?

Question

Given electrons and protons are what we consider fundamental particles and both have a charge of -1 or 1 does it not just make sense we can only have charges in integer multiples of that?

I understand quarks have a 1/3 charge but for the purpose of this discussion I think we can ignore that. We can also ignore magnetic monopoles really that was just a lead in to my question.

(copied from my response to mcgato)

In: Physics

Answer 1

Check out the [fractional Hall effect ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect) .

It turns out that in certain systems, we get particles that exhibit fractional charge.