Magnetic monopoles have been a subject of interest since Dirac established the relation between the existence of monopoles and charge quantization. The Dirac quantization condition bestows the monopole with a huge magnetic charge. We study the scattering of charged ions by monopoles and use backscattering techniques to devise a method to detect monopoles bound in matter.
In cosmological scenarios based on grand unification, string theory or braneworlds, many kinds of topological or non-topological defects, including monopoles and cosmic strings, are predicted to be formed in the early universe. Here we review specifically the physics of composite objects involving monopoles tied to strings. There is a wide variety of these, including for example dumbbells and necklaces, depending on how many strings attach to each monopole and on the extent to which the various fluxes are confined to the strings. We also briefly survey the prospects for observing such structures, the existing observational limits, and potential evidence for a cosmological role.
We describe pair-production models of spin-0 and spin-1/2 magnetic monopoles and high-electric-charge objects in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions, considering both the Drell-Yan and the photon-fusion processes. In particular, we extend the Drell-Yan production model of spin-1/2 high-electric-charge objects to include $Z^0$-boson exchange for proton-proton collisions. Furthermore, we explore spin-1/2 and, for the first time, spin-0 production in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. With matrix element calculations and equivalent photon fluxes implemented in MadGraph5_aMC@NLO, we present leading-order production cross sections of these mechanisms in $sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV proton-proton collisions and $sqrt{s_{text{NN}}} = 5.5$ TeV ultraperipheral lead-lead collisions at the LHC. While the mass range accessible in ultraperipheral lead-lead collisions is much lower than that in proton-proton collisions, we find that the theoretical production cross sections are significantly enhanced in the former for masses below 82 GeV.
The impact of nonlinear effects in the diffractive observables that will be measured in future electron-ion collisions is investigated. We present, for the first time, the predictions for the diffractive structure function and reduced cross sections derived using the solution to the Balitsky--Kovchegov equation with the collinearly-improved kernel and including the impact-parameter dependence. We demonstrate that the contribution of the diffractive events is enhanced in nuclear collisions and that the study of the ratio between the nuclear and proton predictions will be useful to discriminate among different models of the dipole-target scattering amplitude and, consequently, will allow us to constrain the description of QCD dynamics in parton densities.
We calculate azimuthal correlations between the exclusively produced vector meson and the scattered electron in Deep Inelastic Scattering processes at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). We identify kinematical and intrinsic contributions to these correlations, and show that the correlations are sensitive to the non-trivial correlations in the gluon distribution of the target. Realistic predictions at the EIC kinematics are provided using two different approaches to describe the dipole-proton interaction at relatively small $x$.
In this work, we carried out quantum many-body studies of magnetic monopole ensembles through numerical simulations of the path integral for one- and two-component Coulomb Bose systems. We found the relation between the critical temperature for the Bose-Einstein condensation phase transition and the Coulomb coupling strength using two methods, the finite-size scaling of the superfluid fraction and statistical analysis of permutation cycles. After finding parameters that match the correlation functions measured in our system with the correlation functions previously measured on the lattice, we arrived at an effective quantum model of color magnetic monopoles in QCD. From this matched model, we were able to extract the monopole contribution to QCD equation of state near $T_text{c}$.