#StudentSeminar: On the Trail of Highly Ionising Particles at the LHC

by Emanuela Musumeci (IFIC)

Monday 17 Feb 2025, 10:00 → 11:30 Europe/Madrid

1001-Primera-1-1-1 - Paterna. Seminario (Universe)

The search for Highly Ionising Particles (HIPs) is a key approach to exploring physics beyond the Standard Model. These exotic particles, including Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) and High-Electric-Charge Objects (HECOs), appear in various theoretical frameworks, but detecting them remains a major challenge. If such particles exist, they could be produced in high-energy collisions at the LHC.
In this seminar, an overview of the MoEDAL experiment (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC) will be presented. MoEDAL is specifically designed to search for HIPs using a combination of nuclear track detectors, trapping detectors and TimePix radiation monitors to identify their signatures.
Recent developments in the study of HECOs will also be discussed, focusing on Dyson-Schwinger resummation techniques, which provide a more reliable way to calculate production cross-sections. These methods address the challenges of strong coupling where conventional perturbative approaches fail, leading to improved constraints on HECO masses.
Additionally, an indirect approach to probing magnetic monopoles at the LHC will be explored through the γγ → γγ process. This channel is particularly valuable as it allows for possible contributions from new particles such as monopoles. The observability of virtual monopoles in both ultra-peripheral Pb-Pb and pp collisions will be examined, where deviations from Standard Model predictions may indicate their presence. A reinterpretation of LHC data has been performed to impose lower bounds on the MM mass, using two different theoretical frameworks: Born-Infeld theory and Effective Field Theory.

SeminarUV.pdf