Abstract: Electrically charged particles can be created by the decay of strong enough electric fields, a phenomenon known as the Schwinger mechanism(1). By electromagnetic duality, a sufficiently strong magnetic field would similarly produce magnetic monopoles, if they exist(2). Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical fundamental particles that are predicted by several theories beyond the standard model(3-7) but have never been experimentally detected. Searching for the existence of magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism has not yet been attempted, but it is advantageous, owing to the possibility of calculating its rate through semi-classical techniques without perturbation theory, as well as that the production of the magnetic monopoles should be enhanced by their finite size(8,9) and strong coupling to photons(2,10). Here we present a search for magnetic monopole production by the Schwinger mechanism in Pb-Pb heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, producing the strongest known magnetic fields in the current Universe(11). It was conducted by the MoEDAL experiment, whose trapping detectors were exposed to 0.235 per nanobarn, or approximately 1.8 x 10(9), of Pb-Pb collisions with 5.02-teraelectronvolt center-of-mass energy per collision in November 2018. A superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer scanned the trapping detectors of MoEDAL for the presence of magnetic charge, which would induce a persistent current in the SQUID. Magnetic monopoles with integer Dirac charges of 1, 2 and 3 and masses up to 75 gigaelectronvolts per speed of light squared were excluded by the analysis at the 95% confidence level. This provides a lower mass limit for finite-size magnetic monopoles from a collider search and greatly extends previous mass bounds.

Abstract: Magnetic monopoles have been a subject of interest since Dirac established the relation between the existence of monopoles and charge quantization. The intense experimental search carried thus far has not met with success. The Large Hadron Collider is reaching energies never achieved before allowing the search for exotic particles in the TeV mass range. In a continuing effort to discover these rare particles we propose here other ways to detect them. We study the observability of monopoles and monopolium, a monopole-antimonopole bound state, at the Large Hadron Collider in the gamma gamma channel for monopole masses in the range 500-1000 GeV. We conclude that LHC is an ideal machine to discover monopoles with masses below 1 TeV at present running energies and with 5 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity.

Abstract: We present a calculation of the effective cross section sigma(eff), an important ingredient in the description of double parton scattering in proton-proton collisions. Our theoretical approach makes use of a Light-Front quark model as a framework to calculate the double parton distribution functions at low-resolution scale. QCD evolution is implemented to reach the experimental scale. The obtained values of sigma(eff) in the valence region are consistent with the present experimental scenario, in particular with the sets of data which include the same kinematical range. However the result of the complete calculation shows a dependence of sigma(eff) on x(i), a feature not easily seen in the available data, probably because of their low accuracy. Measurements of sigma(eff) in restricted x(i) regions are addressed to obtain indications on double parton correlations, a novel and interesting aspect of the three dimensional structure of the nucleon.