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"Searching for Magnetic Monopoles with MoEDAL"

Date and Time: Friday, December 03, 2021, 03:30pm -
Location: Zoom
 

Speaker: Igor Ostrovskiy, University of Alabama

Abstract:  Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles that carry isolated magnetic charge – a single north or south pole. Dirac demonstrated that existence of an isolated magnetic charge would explain the quantization of the electric charge. As was shown by t'Hooft, any Grand Unification Theory (GUT) that incorporates electromagnetism can contain magnetic monopoles. Unlike Dirac’s point-like particles, GUT solutions are composite objects with an internal structure. String theories also predict monopoles, with masses much lower than the GUT scale, depending on the string scale. In recent years, composite magnetic monopoles with masses as low as a few TeV were also discovered in various field theories beyond the standard model, renewing the motivation to search for their direct production at a collider. One such search is conducted by the MoEDAL experiment at the LHC, which has reported one of the strongest limits on monopole production via Drell-Yan and the photon fusion mechanisms in 13 TeV proton-proton collisions. MoEDAL also placed the first limits at a collider experiment on the production of dyons, hypothetical particles with both electric and magnetic charge. This talk describes the motivation, recent results, and the outlook of the MoEDAL experiment. A particular attention will be given to the most recent MoEDAL’s search for the magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, which provided the first reliable mass limits on composite monopoles.

Host: Andrew Mastbaum

 

 

 

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