Narrow Results

The searches for classical Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) at accelerators, for GUT Super-heavy MMs in the penetrating cosmic radiation and for Intermediate Mass MMs at high altitudes are discussed. The status of the search for other massive exotic particles such as nuclearites and Q-balls is briefly reviewed.

Different exotic particles have been suggested to be part of the cosmic radiation flux, such as Magnetic Monopoles, Strange Quark Matter, Q-balls in a very wide mass range, from multi-TeV to 10¹⁷ GeV and beyond. The SLIM experiment based on a large array of nuclear track detectors at the Chacaltaya Laboratory (Bolivia) reached the highest sensitivity for Intermediate mass MMs, nuclearites and charged Q-balls. After discussing the experimental procedure, the results obtained by the SLIM: experiment are compared with the sensitivity reachable by future searches with large volume neutrino telescopes and space based experiments.