Speaker
Description
The Schwinger mechanism predicts the production of an electron-positron pair through the decay of an extremely strong electric field. The electro-magnetic dual of this process would produce magnetic monopoles (MMs) - if they exist - in sufficiently strong magnetic fields. The 2018 lead ion collisions at the LHC produced the strongest magnetic fields in the known Universe. The MoEDAL detectors – Magnetic Monopole trappers (MMTs) and Nuclear Track Detectors (NTDs) were exposed to 0.235 nb^(−1) of Pb-Pb collisions with 5.02 TeV center-of-mass energy per collision. The analysis excluded the presence of MMs with Dirac charges 1gD ≤ g ≤ 3gD and masses up to 75 GeV/c^(2) at 95% confidence level. Uniquely, the MM production rate can be calculated by semi-classical methods without the use of perturbative calculation. This search, thus, provides the first reliable lower mass bound for the finite-size magnetic monopoles from a collider search while significantly extending previous bounds. This poster would describe the results of this study and the ongoing searches to expand the sensitivity of MoEDAL detectors to higher magnetic charges.
