Looking for magnetic monopoles at LHC with diphoton events

Abstract

Magnetic monopoles have been a subject of interest since Dirac established the relation between the existence of monopoles and charge quantization. The intense experimental search carried thus far has not met with success. The Large Hadron Collider is reaching energies never achieved before allowing the search for exotic particles in the TeV mass range. In a continuing effort to discover these rare particles we propose here other ways to detect them. We study the observability of monopoles and monopolium, a monopole-antimonopole bound state, at the Large Hadron Collider in the $\gamma \gamma$ channel for monopole masses in the range 500-1000 GeV. We conclude that LHC is an ideal machine to discover monopoles with masses below 1 TeV at present running energies and with 5 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity.