  The magnetic monopole appears in theories of spontaneous gauge symmetry
breaking and its existence would explain the quantisation of electric charge.
MoEDAL is the latest approved LHC experiment, designed to search directly for
monopoles produced in high-energy collisions. It has now taken data for the
first time. The MoEDAL detectors are based on two complementary techniques:
nuclear-track detectors are sensitive to the high-ionisation signature expected
from a monopole, and the magnetic monopole trapper (MMT) relies on the stopping
and trapping of monopoles inside an aluminium array which is then analysed with
a superconducting magnetometer. The first results obtained with the MoEDAL MMT
test array deployed in 2012 are presented. This experiment probes monopoles
carrying a multiple of the fundamental unit magnetic charge for the first time
at the LHC.
