Going from this answer here you can escape it with a backslash when you're searching for it, so in your case:
IntellectualObject.where(desc_metadata__intellectual_object_identifier_tesim: params[:intellectual_object_identifier].gsub("/","\/")).first
note the gsub
to sub your /
for \/
EDIT: as you can see in the documentation here:
Solr 4.0 added regular expression support, which means that '/' is now a special character and must be escaped if searching for literal forward slash.
so if you have a token saved like aaa/bbb
you search for it with aaa\/bbb
EDIT #2: from the lucene docs which are linked to above.
Lucene supports escaping special characters that are part of the query syntax. The current list special characters are
+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /