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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 97: Neutrinoastronomie 4

T 97.9: Talk

Thursday, March 1, 2012, 18:45–19:00, ZHG 007

Report on the search for non-relativistic magnetic monopoles with the IceCube Detector — •Emanuel Jacobi, Mohamed Lotfi Benabderrahmane, and Christian Spiering — DESY Zeuthen

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory consists of more than 5000 photomultipliers, deployed in clear antarctic ice at the geographical South Pole. The instrumented ice volume is about 1km³. Neutrino-nucleon interactions produce charged particles which emit Cherenkov light while propagating through the ice. The detection of this light allows the reconstruction of the primary neutrino vertex. Whereas the main focus of IceCube is the measurement of astrophysical neutrinos, this work is on the detection of non-relativistic magnetic monopoles and other heavy particles like supersymmetric Q-Balls or Nuclearites with the IceCube detector.

According to the theory of Rubakov and Callan non-relativistic magnetic monopoles catalyze proton decays. A monopole traversing the detector produces a series of 938MeV cascades along its track. These are registered by the PMTs. Due to the big detector volume even small fluxes can be measured.

The used techniques and the latest status of the ongoing search will be presented in this talk.