Search for Slow Magnetic Monopoles with the NOvA Detector on the Surface

Abstract

We report a search for a magnetic monopole component of the cosmic-ray flux in a 95-day exposure of the NOvA experiment's Far Detector, a 14 kt segmented liquid scintillator detector designed primarily to observe GeV-scale electron neutrinos. No events consistent with monopoles were observed, setting an upper limit on the flux of $2\times 10^{-14}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{-2}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}\mathrm{s}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}$ at 90% C.L. for monopole speed $6\times 10^{-4}<\beta <5\times 10^{-3}$ and mass greater than $5\times 10^8$ GeV. Because of NOvA's small overburden of 3 meters-water equivalent, this constraint covers a previously unexplored low-mass region.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Magnetic Monopole Search at high altitude with the SLIM experiment
• Relativistic Magnetic Monopole Flux Constraints from RICE
• Search for Relativistic Magnetic Monopoles with IceCube

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Monopoles From an Atmospheric Fixed Target Experiment
• JUNO Physics and Detector
• Shining light on magnetic monopoles through high-energy muon colliders
• Ionization-based search for magnetic monopoles using the NOvA Far Detector
• An Effective Field Theory Treatment of the Production and Annihilation of Magnetic Monopoles and their Relic Abundance