They’re not “real” monopoles, in the sense of individual particles that generate a divergent field but rather a quasi-particle (the collective behavior of many individual atoms producing this overall effect).

In the worlds of the authors:

“These monopoles are a collective state of many spins that twirl around a singularity rather than a single fixed particle, so they emerge through many-body interactions. The result is a tiny, localised stable particle with diverging magnetic field coming out of it,” said co-first author Dr Hariom Jani, from the University of Oxford.

That being said, the applications are still pretty exciting and this is something that many people wouldn’t have tought possible at all.