Magnetic Monopoles and Free Fractionally Charged States at Accelerators and in Cosmic Rays

TL;DR

This paper discusses the theoretical prediction and potential detection of magnetic monopoles and fractionally charged states at high-energy accelerators and cosmic ray experiments, highlighting their significance in unified theories.

Contribution

It introduces models predicting lighter magnetic monopoles with multiple Dirac charges and fractional electric charges, and explores their detectability at LHC and cosmic ray observatories.

Findings

Monopoles could be lighter and carry multiple Dirac charges.

Fractionally charged states may be observable at the LHC.

Cosmic ray experiments like IceCube can detect intermediate scale monopoles.

Abstract

Unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions which have electric charge quantization predict the existence of topologically stable magnetic monopoles. Intermediate scale monopoles are comparable with detection energies of cosmic ray monopoles at IceCube and other cosmic ray experiments. Magnetic monopoles in some models can be significantly lighter and carry two, three or possibly even higher quanta of the Dirac magnetic charge. They could be light enough for their effects to be detected at the LHC either directly or indirectly. An example based on a D-brane inspired $SU(3)_C\times SU(3)_L\times SU(3)_R$ (trinification) model with the monopole carrying three quanta of Dirac magnetic charge is presented. These theories also predict the existence of color singlet states with fractional electric charge which may be accessible at the LHC.