The MoEDAL collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is adding a new detector to its experiment, in time for the start of the next run of the collider this coming summer. Named as the MoEDAL Apparatus for Penetrating Particles, or MAPP for short, the new detector will expand the physics scope of MoEDAL to include searches for minicharged particles and long-lived particles.

MoEDAL’s current portfolio of searches for new unknown particles includes searches for magnetic monopoles, theoretical particles with a magnetic charge, and dyons, theoretical particles with both magnetic and electric charge. These searches are conducted using two detector systems, one consisting of detectors that track particles and measure their charge, and another comprising detectors that trap particles for further investigation.

Using these tracking and trapping detector systems, the MoEDAL team has chalked up several achievements, including narrowing the regions of where to look for point-like magnetic monopoles, the first search at a particle accelerator for dyons, and more recently the first search at a particle collider for Schwinger monopoles, which have a finite size.

The new MAPP detector, which is currently being installed in a tunnel adjacent to the LHC tunnel, consists of two main parts. One part, MAPP-mCP, will search for minicharged particles (mCP) – particles with a fractional charge as small as a thousandth of the electron’s charge – using scintillation bars. Another part of the detector, MAPP-LLP, will search for long-lived particles (LLP) employing so-called scintillator hodoscopes arranged in a ‘Russian doll’ configuration.

“MoEDAL-MAPP will allow us to explore many models of physics phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, in ways that are complementary to those of the other LHC detectors,” says MoEDAL spokesperson Jim Pinfold.