Search for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in LHC Pb-Pb collisions

Schwinger predicted the production of an electron-positron pair via the decay of strong electric fields. If magnetic monopoles (MMs) exist, they would be produced in sufficiently strong magnetic fields via the electromagnetic dual of the Schwinger mechanism. Unlike the previously studied MM production processes, the rate can be calculated by the semi-classical methods without using the perturbative calculation. The finite MM size and monopole-photon coupling increase the MM production rate. The 2018 Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC produced the strongest magnetic fields in the known Universe. The MoEDAL experiment searched for MMs in the LHC Run-2, where, its MM trapping detectors were exposed to 0.235 $nb^{-1}$ of Pb-Pb collisions with 5.02 TeV center-of-mass energy per collision. MMs with Dirac charges 1$g_D$ $\leq$ $g$ $\leq$ 3$g_D$ and masses up to 75 GeV/c$^2$ were excluded by the analysis at the 95\% confidence level. This provides the first lower mass limit for finite-size magnetic monopoles from a collider search and significantly extends previous mass bounds. This talk would describe the results from this study and provide an outlook of future searches that would expand the sensitivity of MoEDAL detectors to higher magnetic charges.