A direct search for Dirac magnetic monopoles

Abstract

Magnetic monopoles are highly ionizing and curve in the direction of the magnetic field. A new dedicated magnetic monopole trigger at CDF, which requires large light pulses in the scintillators of the time-of-flight system, remains highly efficient to monopoles while consuming a tiny fraction of the available trigger bandwidth. A specialized offline reconstruction checks the central drift chamber for large dE/dx tracks which do not curve in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. We observed zero monopole candidate events in 35.7 pb⁻¹ of proton-antiproton collisions at ... = 1.96 TeV. This implies a monopole production cross section limit [sigma] < 0.2 pb for monopoles with mass between 100 and 700 GeV, and, for a Drell-Yan like pair production mechanism, a mass limit m > 360 GeV.