Search for very high magnetic charges with the CMS Beam-Pipe via the Schwinger effect

The Schwinger mechanism predicts the production of an electron-positron pair through the decay of an extremely strong electric field. Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) - if they exist - would be produced in sufficiently strong magnetic fields via the electromagnetic dual of this process. In this talk, we report on a search for magnetic monopoles produced in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions during the LHC Run-1. The beryllium beampipe surrounding the interaction region of the CMS experiment was exposed to 174.29 \textmu b$^{-1}$ of Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV in December 2011. The ultraperipheral collisions produced very strong magnetic fields -- several orders of magnitude greater than the critical field strength in quantum electrodynamics. This made possible the production of composite and elementary MMs via the Schwinger effect, a process that is calculable nonperturbatively via semi-classical methods. The beampipe was scanned by the MoEDAL experiment using a SQUID magnetometer to search for trapped MMs. The closeness of the Beryllium trapping volume to the collision point greatly increases the acceptance to high magnetic charges. These advantages allowed us to search for very high magnetic charges, sizeably extending previous search set by the collider experiments.