Recently, in February 2022, the MoEDAL Collaboration (Monopole and Exotics Detection at LHC), of which it is part a group of scientific researchers from the Institute of Space Science (ISS), has been published the article “Search for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism”, Nature 602 63-67 (2022).
The article shows the first experimental limits on the production sections of the magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism, and on their masses. The Schwinger mechanism consists in the extraction of monopole-antimonopole pairs in vacuum, in the extreme magnetic fields produced in the peripheral collisions of ultra-relativistic nuclei.
The published results have been obtained with a sub-detector MoEDAL, “ monopole trapper”, consisting of alumina bars exposed in November 2018 nearby the interaction point of lead nuclei, at a center of mass energy of 5.02 TeV. After, the bars were scanned with a highly sensitive superconductor magnetometer.
The ISS group, which has been contributed to the article (Nature 602, 63–67, 2022), has the responsibility to maintain the libraries of analysis programs used in the collaboration, and in particular, to determine the MoEDAL detectors acceptances. The activity of the MoEDAL-ISS group is been funded by the Institute of Atomic Physics, in frame of the CERN-RO Program.
MoEDAL is a pioneering experiment at LHC/CERN designed to search for highly ionizing avatars of new physics such as magnetic monopoles or massive (pseudo-)stable charged particles. More about the MoEDAL experiment is available here.
Contact Person ISS: Dr. Vlad Popa <vpopa[at]spacescience[dot]ro>
