Energetics of monopole production

The relativistic kinematics of monopole production and mechanisms of energy loss and gain for monopoles in free space and in the upper atmosphere are studied. It is shown that a monopole produced in a nuclear interaction must have a laboratory energy greater than about 200,000 GeV if its mass is greater than 600 GeV per sq cm. A study of energy loss mechanisms of such an energetic monopole in the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere rules out the possibility of observing such a monopole with the parameters observed by Price et al. (1975). The very low velocity of the observed monopole also makes an extraterrestrial production mechanism very unlikely.