Dirac's Dream - the Search for the Magnetic Monopole

I first quickly summarize the history of the Magnetic Monopole leading to the quantum theory of magnetic charge that started with a 1931 paper by Paul Dirac who showed that the existence of magnetic monopoles was consistent with Maxwell's equations only if electric charges are quantized. Next I will briefly review the status of monopole searches. Last, but not least I discuss in more detail the MoEDALexperiment - the latest accelerator experiment designed to search for direct production of magnetic monopoles or dyons (particles with electric and magnetic charge) and other highly ionizing particles such as heavy (pseudo-) stable particles with conventional electric charge - at the LHC. The MoEDAL experiment employs nuclear track-etch detectors deployed in the VELO vertex region of the LHCb experiment.