Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering: Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports a precise measurement of the ratio of positron-proton to electron-proton elastic scattering cross sections, directly probing the contribution of hard two-photon exchange, with results that challenge some theoretical predictions.

Contribution

The study provides the first high-precision experimental determination of the hard two-photon exchange contribution across a wide range of virtual photon polarization.

Findings

Measured $R_{2 heta}$ values are smaller than some hadronic models predict.

Results are consistent with dispersion models and phenomenological fits.

Data covers a broad range of virtual photon polarization ($0.456<<0.978).

Abstract

The OLYMPUS collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, $R_{2\gamma}$, a direct measure of the contribution of hard two-photon exchange to the elastic cross section. In the OLYMPUS measurement, 2.01~GeV electron and positron beams were directed through a hydrogen gas target internal to the DORIS storage ring at DESY. A toroidal magnetic spectrometer instrumented with drift chambers and time-of-flight scintillators detected elastically scattered leptons in coincidence with recoiling protons over a scattering angle range of $\approx 20\degree$ to $80\degree$. The relative luminosity between the two beam species was monitored using tracking telescopes of interleaved GEM and MWPC detectors at $12\degree$, as well as symmetric M{\o}ller/Bhabha calorimeters at $1.29\degree$. A total integrated luminosity of 4.5~fb$^{-1}$ was collected. In the extraction of $R_{2\gamma}$, radiative effects were taken into account using a Monte Carlo generator to simulate the convolutions of internal bremsstrahlung with experiment-specific conditions such as detector acceptance and reconstruction efficiency. The resulting values of $R_{2\gamma}$, presented here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization $0.456<\epsilon<0.978$, are smaller than some hadronic two-photon exchange calculations predict, but are in reasonable agreement with a subtracted dispersion model and a phenomenological fit to the form factor data.