SuppliedThe only Canadian-led, and University of Alberta-led, research team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland is leading the chase on magnetic monopoles.
James Pinfold, a professor in the U of A’s Department of Physics, spearheads MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector At LHC), a research project between 70 physicists from 26 institutions. From the subterranean chambers of the LHC, MoEDAL aims to discover the particle that causes magnetism.
“The LHC recreates the Big Bang, little fragments at a time. If we see something, we know it’ll be very important for our understanding of the universe,” Pinfold, who divides his time between teaching at the U of A and conducting research at the LHC, said.
Pinfold is joined on the MoEDAL experiment by U of A computing scientist Pierre Boulanger and physicists Marc de Montigny, Jack Tuszynski, and Richard Soluk. Other Canadian collaborators on the project are housed by York University, Concordia University, and the University of British Columbia.
Magnetic monopoles, which have yet to be observed by scientists, were first hypothesized in the 1930s by Nobel Laureate Paul Dirac as particles that only carry a north or south charge. The monopoles would be analogous to electrons, which have only a negative electric charge, and positrons, which only have a positive electric charge.
So far, magnetic objects have been understood as having two charges at once: a north and south charge. Even when a bar magnet is cut in half, the result is two smaller magnets with their own a north and south charges; not a north-charged magnet and a south-charged magnet. Searches for monopole particles have been carried out at different particle accelerators since 1931, but so far no researcher has been successful.
MoEDAL’s report from August found that no monopoles were detectable under the conditions of 8 Trillion electron Volts (TeV) at the LHC — that is, the team has yet to find the particle they’re looking for, but they aren’t giving up yet.
“A discovery is always much more fun,” Pinfold said. “But it’s just as important to see what isn’t the case.”
Now, MoEDAL is running experiments at 13 TeV to increase the chances of detecting the “very heavy” monopole, which is believed to be at least 1,000 times the weight of a proton, Pinfold said.
The discovery of a magnetic monopole would dramatically change physics because the particle isn’t predicted by the Standard Model, which has been used to explain how the universe functions since the 1970s. Although the Standard Model was finally completed in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that gives matter mass, it fails to explain certain phenomena including the universe’s expansion, gravity, and dark matter particles.
“The Higgs was an expected unexpected event, because it was predicted,” Pinfold said. “Whereas, anything other than that would have been an unexpected unexpected event, and therefore, arguably more important, because it takes us in a new direction.”
The discovery of a magnetic monopole would further undermine the Standard Model’s validity.
“We know the Standard Model’s not the end,” Pinfold said. “Although it has described everything we’ve seen so far to date, perfectly.”
