On August 12, 2016, Konkuk University (KU) announced that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has made progress in research on magnetic monopole through the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the Large Hadron Collider (MoEDAL) experiment, which was designed to search for the electroweak Cho-Maison monopole predicted by KU’s Distinguished Professor Yongmin Cho and Dr. Dieter Maison of the Max-Planck Institute in 1997. Introduced by Paul Dirac in 1931, magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles with only one pole, but they have never been observed despite searches using accelerators.
CERN’s research was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics in an article titled “Search for Magnetic Monopoles with the MoEDAL Prototype Trapping Detector in 8 TeV Proton-Proton Collisions at the LHC.” Professor Jong Hyuk Yoon of KU’s Department of Physics as well as Professor Dowon Kim and Professor Seongchul Lee of Gangneung-Wonju National University are participating in the MoEDAL experiment. Regarding the research, Professor James Pinfold of the University of Alberta, who also serves as the spokesperson of the experiment, commented that “MoEDAL celebrates the release of its first physics result and joins the other LHC experiments at the discovery frontier.”