First experimental search for production of magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism

Abstract

Schwinger showed that electrically-charged particles can be produced in a strong electric field by quantum tunnelling through the Coulomb barrier. By electromagnetic duality, if magnetic monopoles (MMs) exist, they would be produced by the same mechanism in a sufficiently strong magnetic field. Unique advantages of the Schwinger mechanism are that its rate can be calculated using semiclassical techniques without relying on perturbation theory, and the finite MM size and strong MM-photon coupling are expected to enhance their production. Pb-Pb heavy-ion collisions at the LHC produce the strongest known magnetic fields in the current Universe, and this article presents the first search for MM production by the Schwinger mechanism. It was conducted by the MoEDAL experiment during the 5.02 TeV/nucleon heavy-ion run at the LHC in November 2018, during which the MoEDAL trapping detectors (MMTs) were exposed to 0.235 nb${}^{-1}$ of Pb-Pb collisions. The MMTs were scanned for the presence of magnetic charge using a SQUID magnetometer. MMs with Dirac charges 1$g_D$ $\le$ $g$ $\le$ 3$g_D$ and masses up to 75 GeV/c${}^2$ were excluded by the analysis. This provides the first lower mass limit for finite-size MMs from a collider search and significantly extends previous mass bounds.

arXiv commentMinor fixes to the authorship list found during production

References in corpus (36)

• The effects of topological charge change in heavy ion collisions: "Event by event P and CP violation"
• Magnetars
• Event-by-event generation of electromagnetic fields in heavy-ion collisions
• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Centrality determination of Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV with ALICE
• Electromagnetic fields and anomalous transports in heavy-ion collisions --- A pedagogical review
• Magnetohydrodynamics, charged currents and directed flow in heavy ion collisions
• Time and space dependence of electromagnetic field in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Centrality dependence of particle production in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$= 5.02 TeV
• Theoretical and Experimental Status of Magnetic Monopoles
• Monopoles in Weinberg-Salam Model
• The Physics Programme Of The MoEDAL Experiment At The LHC
• Magnetic fields in heavy ion collisions: flow and charge transport
• Magnetic monopoles revisited: Models and searches at colliders and in the Cosmos
• Search for magnetic monopoles in sqrt(s) = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector
• Search for magnetic monopoles with the MoEDAL prototype trapping detector in 8 TeV proton-proton collisions at the LHC
• Magnetic monopole search with the full MoEDAL trapping detector in 13 TeV $pp$ collisions interpreted in photon-fusion and Drell-Yan production
• The Price of an Electroweak Monopole
• Search for magnetic monopoles and stable particles with high electric charges in 8 TeV $pp$ collisions with the ATLAS detector
• Thermal Schwinger pair production at arbitrary coupling
• Magnetic monopole mass bounds from heavy ion collisions and neutron stars
• Finite Energy Electroweak Dyon
• Search for magnetic monopoles and stable high-electric-charge objects in 13 TeV proton-proton collisions with the ATLAS detector
• Towards Schwinger production of magnetic monopoles in heavy-ion collisions
• Magnetic Monopoles from Global Monopoles in the presence of Kalb-Ramond Torsion
• First search for dyons with the full MoEDAL trapping detector in 13 TeV pp collisions
• Electroweak monopoles and the electroweak phase transition
• Schwinger pair production of magnetic monopoles: momentum distribution for heavy-ion collisions
• Topologically stable, finite-energy electroweak-scale monopoles
• Direct and Indirect Searches for Low-Mass Magnetic Monopoles
• Regularised Kalb-Ramond Magnetic Monopole with Finite Energy
• Classical production of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles from magnetic fields
• Pair Production and Vacuum Polarization of Vector Particles with Electric Dipole Moments and Anomalous Magnetic Moments
• Monopole-Antimonopole Pair Production in Primordial Magnetic Fields
• Instanton solution for Schwinger production of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles
• Aspects of relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Opportunities for new physics searches with heavy ions at colliders
• Energy balance and Alfvén Mach numbers in compressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence with a large-scale magnetic field
• MoEDAL search in the CMS beam pipe for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger effect
• Searches for exotic spin-dependent interactions with spin sensors
• Monopole-fermion scattering and varying Fock space
• Search for magnetic monopole pair production in ultraperipheral Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{\text{NN}}}}=5.36$ TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Parker Bounds on Monopoles with Arbitrary Charge from Galactic and Primordial Magnetic Fields
• Search for Highly-Ionizing Particles in pp Collisions During LHC Run-2 Using the Full MoEDAL Detector
• Monopole acceleration in intergalactic magnetic fields
• Monopoles From an Atmospheric Fixed Target Experiment
• Shining light on magnetic monopoles through high-energy muon colliders
• Euclidean methods and phase transitions for the strongest deformations compatible with Schwarzschild asymptotics
• The next frontiers for magnetic monopole searches
• Recasting Experimental Constraints on Relativistic Magnetic Monopoles
• Magnetic-monopole resummation justifies perturbatively calculated collider production cross sections
• On the issue of magnetic monopoles in the prospect of UHE photon searches
• How physics got its right hand: The origins of chiral conventions in electromagnetism
• An Effective Field Theory Treatment of the Production and Annihilation of Magnetic Monopoles and their Relic Abundance
• Degenerate wave-like solutions to the Dirac equation for massive particles
• MoEDAL-MAPP: the first dedicated search experiment at the LHC