On the cosmological abundance of magnetic monopoles

Abstract We demonstrate that Debye shielding cannot be employed to constrain the cosmological abundance of magnetic monopoles, contrary to what is stated in the previous literature. Current model-independent bounds on the monopole abundance are then revisited for unit Dirac magnetic charge. We find that the Andromeda Parker bound can be employed to set an upper limit on the monopole flux at the level of F M ≲ 5.3 × 10−19cm−2s−1sr−1 for a monopole mass 1013 GeV/c 2 ≲ m ≲ 1016 GeV/c 2, which is more stringent than the MACRO direct search limit by two orders of magnitude. This translates into stringent constraints on the monopole density parameter Ω M at the level of 10−7˘10−4 depending on the mass. For larger monopole masses the scenarios in which magnetic monopoles account for all or the majority of dark matter are disfavored.