Learning from Dark Monopoles

 

Magnetic monopoles appear in many motivated quantum field theories and give electromagnetism a suggestive symmetry. As Dirac showed, magnetic monopoles also explain why electric charges are quantized. This same quantization condition implies that the monopoles of our familiar electrodynamics have a large, nonperturbative, coupling to the photon.
 

However, if a dark photon with magnetic monopoles has a small mixing with our photon, then the dark monopoles can develop a small, perturbative, magnetic coupling to our photon. This provides a theoretical laboratory for learning about the interactions between electric and magnetic charges in quantum field theory. I explain how to use these types of mixing models to explore these theoretical questions. I then discuss the phenomenology of these dark monopoles as a fraction of the dark matter. In particular, I outline how these monopoles can be detected through Aharonov-Bohm phase shifts.