Search for Magnetic Monopoles and Stable High-Electric-Charge Objects in 13 TeV Centre-of-Mass Energy Proton-Proton Collisions with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC

One asymmetry of the current formulation of classical electrodynamics is the absence of a magnetic monopole, despite the existence of isolated electric charges. The existence of such a particle with net magnetic charge not only restores the symmetry between electricity and magnetism but also provides an explanation for the quantization of electric charges due to a correlation between the magnitude of a magnetic charge and that of an electric charge. Magnetic monopoles do not decays and lose kinetic energy in matter similarly as ions with high electric charge. This work presents the strategy and results of a search for magnetic monopoles and stable high-electric-charge objects with mass up to 4000 GeV. It is performed with 137 fb −1 of proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected during 2015 – 2018 with the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No deviation from Standard Model predictions are observed, thus exclusion limits are placed on production models. These limits surpass the ones obtained in the previous search. With the increase in statistics and an interest in heavy-ion collisions, the search for magnetic monopoles and stable high-electric-charge objects will continue to play an important role in the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model.