MoEDAL’s technical coordinator R. Soluk holds the decommissioned CMS beam pipe donated to MoEDAL to search
for highly charged magnetic monopoles.
New research using a decommissioned section of the beam pipe from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has brought scientists closer than ever before to test whether magnetic monopoles exist.
Physicists have long speculated about the existence of magnetic monopoles—particles with only a single magnetic pole. Despite extensive searches, these elusive particles remain undetected. Recently, an international team, including UA Professor Igor Ostrovskiy’s and Aditya Upreti, a Ph.D. candidate from the University, published the most stringent constraints on magnetic monopoles in the leading journal in physics, Physical Review Letters. They examined a decommissioned section of beam pipe from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which had been exposed to intense radiation from particle collisions.
Despite being an old piece of pipe destined for disposal, the researchers’ predictions indicated it might be the most promising place on Earth to find a magnetic monopole. Aditya Upreti, leading the experimental analysis as part of his Ph.D. dissertation work in Prof. Ostrovskiy’s MoEDAL group at The University of Alabama noted that the pipe’s proximity to collisions offered a unique opportunity to detect monopoles with unprecedentedly high magnetic charges.
The MoEDAL collaboration used a superconductive magnetometer to scan the beam pipe for signatures of trapped magnetic charge. Although no monopoles were found, their results set new limits, excluding monopoles lighter than 80 GeV/c² and providing leading constraints for magnetic charges between 2 and 45 base units.