Date:  Wednesday 17 July 2019
Speaker:  Jim Brooke (Bristol)
Title:  "MilliQan - A dedicated search for Millicharged Particles"


In the absence of evidence for a magnetic monopole, the quantisation of charges remains a mystery.  
Simple extensions to the Standard Model can give rise to particles with very small, non-quantised 
charge, commonly known as millicharged particles.  Existing constraints on such particles extend 
only to masses of around 100 MeV.  Heavier millicharged particles may be produced at the Large Hadron 
Collider, but since they would exhibit very small ionisation energy losses, they would go unnoticed 
by existing detectors.  MilliQan is a simple, low-cost detector planned for installation in an unused 
underground tunnel near LHC Point 5 (CMS), that will be capable of discovering millicharged particles 
up to masses of ~100 GeV and charges down to ~0.001e