Extending the constraint for axion-like particles as resonances at the LHC and laser beam experiments

• Published in: Physics letters. B 2019-08, Vol.795, p.339-345
• Main Authors: Baldenegro, C., Hassani, S., Royon, C., Schoeffel, L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: General Physics; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; Physics
• ISSN: 0370-2693; 1873-2445
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2019.06.029

We study the discovery potential of axion-like particles (ALP), pseudo-scalars weakly coupled to Standard Model fields, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our focus is on ALPs coupled to the electromagnetic field, which would induce anomalous scattering of light-by-light. This can be directly probed in central exclusive production of photon pairs in ultra-peripheral collisions at the LHC in proton and heavy-ion collisions. We consider non-standard collision modes of the LHC, such as argon-argon collisions at sNN=7 TeV and proton-lead collisions at sNN=8.16 TeV, to access regions in the parameter space complementary to the ones previously considered for lead-lead and proton-proton collisions. In addition, we show that, using laser beam interactions, we can constrain ALPs as resonant deviations in the refractive index induced by anomalous light-by-light scattering effects. If we combine the aforementioned approaches, ALPs can be probed in a wide range of masses from the eV scale up to the TeV scale.