The MoEDAL Experiment

CERN: The LHC MoEDAL Experiment

A new experiment is set to join the LHC fold. As James Pinfold explains, MoEDAL will conduct the search for magnetic monopoles.

On 2 December 2009 the CERN Research Board approved the LHC's seventh experiment: the Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC (MoEDAL). The prime motivation of this experiment is to search for the direct production of the magnetic monopole at the LHC. Another physics aim is the search for exotic, highly ionizing, stable (or pseudo-stable) massive particles (SMPs) with conventional electric charge. Although MoEDAL is a small experiment by LHC standards it has a huge physics potential that complements the already wide vista of the existing LHC experiments.

Students will help the MoEDAL experiment at CERN seek evidence of magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes and other phenomena.

For the first time, a high school has joined a high-energy physics experiment as a full member. Students from the Simon Langton Grammar School in Canterbury, England, have become participants in the newest experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The students will help with the search for new exotic particles such as magnetic monopoles, massive supersymmetric particles, microscopic black hole remnants, Q-balls and strangelets through an experiment called MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC).

The students, who take part in a school-based research lab, will remotely monitor radiation backgrounds at the experiment.

The MoEDAL Collaboration Meeting, June 2014.