New Collider Searches for Axion-like Particles Coupling to Gluons

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of current and future colliders to detect axion-like particles interacting with gluons, setting new bounds on their couplings through advanced simulation and analysis techniques.

Contribution

First analysis of LHC13 sensitivity to ALPs via di-jet production with realistic simulation and multivariate discrimination.

Findings

LHC13 can set new upper bounds on ALP-gluon coupling.

Future colliders like HE-LHC27 and FCC-hh100 can improve these bounds by about tenfold.

The process is highly sensitive to ALP-gluon interactions, surpassing previous limits.

Abstract

Axion-like particles (ALPs) are pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons associated with spontaneously broken global symmetries emerging in many extensions of the Standard Model. Assuming the most general effective Lagrangian up to dimension-5 operators for an ALP interacting with the SM fields, we investigate for the first time the sensitivity of the LHC13 to the ALP production in association with a di-jet. This study is focused on light ALPs which appear as invisible particles at the detector. Performing a realistic detector simulation and deploying a multivariate technique to best discriminate the signal from backgrounds, we set expected upper bounds on the ALP coupling to gluons. A comprehensive set of background processes is considered, and it is shown that this process provides significant sensitivity to the ALP-gluon coupling and the resulting bound is more stringent than those already obtained at the LHC. We also present prospects for the HE-LHC27 and FCC-hh100 and show that these future colliders are able to improve the limits from the LHC by roughly one order of magnitude.