The MoEDAL Experiment at the LHC

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The CERN Research Board unanimously approved the MoEDAL experiment in March 2010. The MoEDAL collaboration is comprised of 18 institutes from around the world. The four Canadian MoEDAL Institutes are: the University of Alberta, UBC, Concordia University and York University. The prime motivation of the MoEDAL experiment is to search for the direct production of the magnetic monopoles and dyons as well as other avatars of new physics in the form of highly ionizing, long-lived electrically charged massive particles (SMPs), such as: black hole remnants, double charged Higgs particles, sleptons, R-hadrons, technibaryons, Q-balls, D-particles, Quirks, strangelets, etc. Importantly, MoEDAL could make potential revolutionary, paradigm shifting discoveries in a number of theoretical arenas. For example, many regard that the discovery of a Magnetic Monopole would have a revolutionary impact on science that is greater than that of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The main MoEDAL detector, deployed around the LHCb intersection region, is the largest array (over 260 sqm) of plastic Nuclear Track Detector (NTD) stacks and trapping detectors ever deployed at an accelerator. MoEDAL has a dual nature. First, as a giant camera for "photographing" new physics where the NTD systems are the camera's "film" and second as a matter trap analyzer for new massive stable particles. Possible radiation induced backgrounds will be monitored online by an array of innovative TimePix silicon pixel imaging chips. MoEDAL, does not suffer from the problems which would severely hamper detection of slow moving highly ionizing particles at the two other main LHC detectors, ATLAS or CMS. Thus, MoEDAL's physics reach complements that of the existing general purpose LHC experiments and builds on the existing Canadian involvement with the LHC. Although MoEDAL NTD and TimePix test arrays are in place - the full MoEDAL detector is not due to be deployed until the long shutdown in 2013. The MoEDAL experiment will officially start to take data at 14 TeV at the startup of the LHC in 2014/2015 and continue for 4-5 years.