Axion-Like Particles at the ILC Giga-Z

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the future ILC Giga-Z experiment to detect Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) with hypercharge coupling, especially in the 0.4 to 50 GeV mass range, by leveraging its high production rate and advanced detectors.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the ILC Giga-Z's sensitivity to hypercharge-coupled ALPs in the 100 MeV to 100 GeV mass range, highlighting its discovery potential.

Findings

ILC Giga-Z can probe ALP couplings down to 10^{-5} GeV^{-1}

Significant sensitivity improvement over current experiments in 0.4-50 GeV mass range

Potential to discover ALPs with masses up to 50 GeV and couplings near 10^{-5} GeV^{-1}

Abstract

Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) are a generic, calculable, and well motivated extension of the Standard Model with far reaching phenomenology. ALPs that couple only to hypercharge represent one subset of such models, coupling the ALP to both photons and the $Z$ boson. We examine the current constraints on this class of models with an ALP mass in the 100 MeV to 100 GeV range, paying particular attention to the region between 100 MeV to 10 GeV, a portion of parameter space which is ill constrained by current experiments. We show that the more than $10^{9}$ $Z$ bosons produced in the Giga-Z mode of the future ILC experiment, combined with the highly granular nature of its detectors, will allow for ALPs coupled to hypercharge to be discovered with couplings down to nearly $10^{-5}\,\rm{GeV^{-1}}$ over a range of masses from 0.4 to 50 GeV.