Magnetic monopole pair production in particle collisions

Magnetic monopoles, particles with magnetic charge, are among the most interesting hypothetical elementary particles that are being searched for with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where the MoEDAL experiment has been specifically designed for this purpose. No direct evidence of them has been found in indirect or direct searches so far, but there are strong theoretical reasons to believe that they exist, and their mass could be low enough to allow them to be produced at the LHC. However, there is currently no useful quantum field theory description of magnetic monopoles, and therefore there are no theoretical predictions of their production cross section. The aim of this project is to develop and use lattice field theory simulations and other non-perturbative techniques to carry out this computation. The student will become a member of the MoEDAL collaboration, and the results will be used in the analysis of the data from the experiment.