The MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider, has made a significant leap in its quest for magnetic monopoles. Reported in two papers posted on the arXiv preprint server, the collaboration has narrowed the search window for these magnetic charge-bearing particles. The latest searches conducted by the MoEDAL experiment shrink the theoretical arenas in which the hunt for magnetic monopoles can continue, according to the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN).
No magnetic monopoles or high-electric-charge objects
The MoEDAL team found no magnetic monopoles or high-electric-charge objects (HECOs) in their latest scanning of the trapping volumes. But it set bounds on the mass and production rate of these particles for different values of particle spin, an intrinsic form of angular momentum. “MoEDAL’s search reach for both monopoles and HECOs allows the collaboration to survey a huge swathe of the theoretical ‘discovery space’ for these hypothetical particles,” said MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold. According to CERN, the MoEDAL team in its second latest study concentrated on the search for monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in heavy-ion collision data taken during Run 1 of the LHC.
Scanned beam pipe in search of trapped monopoles
The team scanned a decommissioned section of the CMS experiment beam pipe, instead of the MoEDAL detector’s trapping volumes, in search of trapped monopoles. Once again, the team found no monopoles, but it set the strongest-to-date mass limits on Schwinger monopoles with a charge between 2gD and 45gD, ruling out the existence of monopoles with masses of up to 80 GeV, as per CERN. “The vital importance of the Schwinger mechanism is that the production of composite monopoles is not suppressed compared to that of elementary ones, as is the case with the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion processes,” explains Pinfold. “Thus, if monopoles are composite particles, this and our previous Schwinger-monopole search may have been the first-ever chances to observe them.”
International Research Conference on High Energy Physics and Computational Science
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