MoEDAL search in the CMS beam pipe for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger effect

Abstract

We report on a search for magnetic monopoles (MMs) produced in ultraperipheral Pb--Pb collisions during Run-1 of the LHC. The beam pipe surrounding the interaction region of the CMS experiment was exposed to 184.07 \textmu b${}^{-1}$ of Pb--Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV center-of-mass energy per collision in December 2011, before being removed in 2013. It was scanned by the MoEDAL experiment using a SQUID magnetometer to search for trapped MMs. No MM signal was observed. The two distinctive features of this search are the use of a trapping volume very close to the collision point and ultra-high magnetic fields generated during the heavy-ion run that could produce MMs via the Schwinger effect. These two advantages allowed setting the first reliable, world-leading mass limits on MMs with high magnetic charge. In particular, the established limits are the strongest available in the range between 2 and 45 Dirac units, excluding MMs with masses of up to 80 GeV at 95\% confidence level.

As accepted by PRL. 7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (11)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Theoretical and Experimental Status of Magnetic Monopoles
• Magnetic monopoles revisited: Models and searches at colliders and in the Cosmos
• Line Operators in the Standard Model
• Magnetic monopole search with the full MoEDAL trapping detector in 13 TeV $pp$ collisions interpreted in photon-fusion and Drell-Yan production
• First experimental search for production of magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism
• First search for dyons with the full MoEDAL trapping detector in 13 TeV pp collisions
• Schwinger pair production of magnetic monopoles: momentum distribution for heavy-ion collisions
• Topologically stable, finite-energy electroweak-scale monopoles
• Triply Charged Monopole and Magnetic Quarks
• Monopoles, Exotic states and Muon $g-2$ in TeV scale Trinification

Cited by in corpus (4)

• 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
• The next frontiers for magnetic monopole searches
• Magnetic-monopole resummation justifies perturbatively calculated collider production cross sections
• Ionization-based search for magnetic monopoles using the NOvA Far Detector