Magnetic Monopole
Sorry, but I can't give you a list of even potential properties for this particle. It's defined by exactly one characteristic, that of having only one magnetic pole.
As everyone who's played around with a few magnets knows, magnets have ends that repel each other and ends that attract each other. These attracting/repelling regions are the poles. Every magnet has two, a positive one and a negative one, and cutting a magnet in half is going to yield two smaller magnets that still each have two poles. Likes repel and opposites attract.
But magnetism is just part of electromagnetism, and it's caused by the movement of charged particles. With electricity, you also get positive and negative stuff, with the unique element that you can separate the two, forming an electric monopole. In fact, that's really easy to do. An electron is an electric monopole, contentedly going through life with just one of kind of charge. But magnetic monopoles, particles that have only one end of the magnet, either positive or negative, don't exist, or at least have never before been observed.
So why is that weird? Why should we want magnetic monopoles to exist? Back in 1931, Paul Dirac was hard at work creating a quantum theory of electromagnetism and discovered that if even a single magnetic monopole exists somewhere in the universe, it would explain why all electric charges everywhere are quantized the way they are. It is a very, very good thing that electric charges cancel to neutral the way they do; otherwise the universe would be a rather inhospitable, lightening filled sort of place. So every since then, the hunt has been on to find a particle that contains only one magnetic pole.
So far, no conclusive evidence has been found. It is currently thought that any magnetic monopoles must have masses greater than about 600000 MeV, or beyond the reach of previous experiments.
And yes, we use that explanation a lot. So far, that is the typical explanation when we think we should see a particle and it hasn't been there.
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