Search for monopole pair production in ultraperipheral Pb+Pb collisions with the ATLAS detector

Ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions, where the distance between the centres of the two colliding nuclei is larger than the sum of the nuclear radii, provide unique opportunities to study processes with strong electromagnetic fields. In particular, Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC deliver extremely large magnetic fields (with strength up to 10^{16} Tesla) and enable the generation of magnetic monopole pairs (if exist) via the Schwinger mechanism, in analogy to e+e- pair creation by the decay of strong enough electric fields. 
In this seminar I will present a search for low-mass magnetic monopoles using Run-3 ultraperipheral Pb+Pb collision data at 5.36 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector.
Due to its high ionization and unique trajectory in the detector magnetic field, a monopole is expected to leave a large number of clusters in the ATLAS Pixel detector in the absence of reconstructed charged-particle tracks or activity in the calorimeters.
The results are interpreted with recently developed semiclassical models that include non-perturbative cross section calculations, and are compared with a recent search performed by MoEDAL. The analysis features a new methodology for studying highly ionizing particles in heavy-ion data at the LHC.

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