Magnetic monopole searches in the cosmic radiation

Abstract

There has been a big effort in the past twenty years with at least a couple of generations of experiments which searched for supermassive GUT magnetic monopoles in the cosmic radiation. Here a short review of these searches is given, together with a brief description of the theoretical framework and of the detection techniques.

Talk given at the Vulcano workshop on "Frontier Objects in Astrophysics and Particle Physics", May 2002