THE PHYSICS OF MAGNETIC MONOPOLES
On Wednesday 16th, our program hosts an outreach session starting at 16:30 (approximate duration: 75 minutes) and featuring two invited speakers:
- Prof. Arttu Rajantie, a member of the MoEDAL experiment searching for magnetic monopoles produced in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland);
- Dr Max Bachmaier, a recent graduate from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, Garching (Germany); he has been involved in a collaboration studying the scattering of magnetic monopoles via numerical simulation of their field theory models, generating sophisticated computer animations of collision events.
Arttu Rajantie (Imperial College, London, UK)
Magnetic monopoles: where are they?
| Magnetic monopoles are among the most compelling predictions of theoretical physics, yet no convincing evidence for their existence has been found. In many ways, they are unlike any other hypothetical particle, with important implications for how they can be produced and detected. I will review the broad range of search strategies that have been pursued, from indirect astrophysical constraints to direct searches in cosmic rays and collider experiments. Particular emphasis will be placed on recent LHC searches based on the electromagnetic dual of the Schwinger pair-production mechanism, which provides a theoretically controlled framework for monopole production in strong electromagnetic fields. I will conclude by discussing the future prospects for monopole searches and the implications of a discovery for fundamental physics. |
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Max Bachmaier (EHU, Bilbao, Spain)
Magnetic monopoles: how do they collide?
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The topological structure of magnetic monopoles (originally uncovered by ’t Hooft and Polyakov) has remarkable consequences on their collisions; Manton suggested that their dynamics may be understood as motion through a geometric “moduli space” of all static monopole configurations of minimal energy compatible with such structure. In the mid-1980s, this proposal led Atiyah and Hitchin to construct the moduli space of two monopoles and to show that, in a head-on collision, two monopoles scatter at a right angle. Since then, a variety of monopole scattering processes has been explored. Advances in computational power and numerical techniques now allow us to simulate these scenarios directly. In this talk, I will explain the origin of right-angle scattering using simple illustrations and animations. I will then present the first fully field-theoretic simulations of magnetic monopole collisions, which provide a precise numerical test of the predictions that were based on the moduli space approach. |
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We dedicate this special session to Prof. Nigel Hitchin and Prof. Gerard ’t Hooft, to commemorate their 80th birthdays earlier this Summer.