A direct search for Dirac magnetic monopoles

Magnetic monopoles are highly ionizing and curve in the direction of the magnetic field. A new dedicated magnetic monopole trigger at CDF, which requires large light pulses in the scintillators of the time-of-flight system, remains highly efficient to monopoles while consuming a tiny fraction of the available trigger bandwidth. A specialized offline reconstruction checks the central drift chamber for large dE/dx tracks which do not curve in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. We observed zero monopole candidate events in 35.7 pb⁻¹ of proton-antiproton collisions at ... = 1.96 TeV. This implies a monopole production cross section limit [sigma] < 0.2 pb for monopoles with mass between 100 and 700 GeV, and, for a Drell-Yan like pair production mechanism, a mass limit m > 360 GeV.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Mulhearn, Michael James

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Christoph M.E. Paus.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32420

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32420