Eur. Phys. J. C (2012) 72: 1985
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-012-1985-2

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Sensitivity of LHC experiments to exotic highly ionising particles

¹ CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
² Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
³ Department of Physics, UC-Davis, Davis, USA
⁴ Département de Physique Nucléaire et Corpuculaire, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
⁵ Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
⁶ Fysikum, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
⁷ Department of Physics, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

^* e-mail: philippe.mermod@cern.ch

Received: 20 December 2011
Revised: 22 March 2012
Published online: 24 April 2012

Abstract

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are able to discover or set limits on the production of exotic particles with TeV-scale masses possessing values of electric and/or magnetic charge such that they behave as highly ionising particles (HIPs). In this paper the sensitivity of the LHC experiments to HIP production is discussed in detail. It is shown that a number of different detection methods are required to investigate as fully as possible the charge-mass range. These include direct detection as the HIPs pass through either passive or active detectors and, in the case of magnetically charged objects, the so-called induction method with which magnetic monopoles which stop in accelerator and detector material could be observed. The benefit of using complementary approaches to HIP detection is discussed.