Lighting Electroweak-Violating ALP-Lepton Interactions at $e^{+}e^{-}$ and $ep$ Colliders

TL;DR

This paper proposes new collider processes involving electroweak-violating ALP-lepton interactions, demonstrating energy-dependent enhancements and decay signatures, to improve search strategies for ALPs at high-energy colliders.

Contribution

It introduces novel t-channel processes involving ALPs and explores their energy behaviors and decay signatures, advancing collider search methods for electroweak-violating ALPs.

Findings

Energy enhancement in cross sections with increasing collision energy

Heavier ALPs decay predominantly into photon pairs via chiral anomaly

New strategies to distinguish electroweak-violating from preserving ALP interactions

Abstract

Recently, Altmannshofer, Dror and Gori (2022) claimed there is a four-point interaction, $W$-$\ell$-$\nu$-$a$, in the electroweak-violating scenario of axion-like particle (ALP) and lepton interactions which plays a critical role in searching for ALPs from $\pi^{\pm}$, $K^{\pm}$ mesons and $W$ boson decays because of the novel energy enhancements. Inspired by this interesting finding, we first propose new t-channel processes, $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\nu_e a\bar{\nu_e}$ and $e^{-}p\rightarrow\nu_e a j$, for electrophilic ALPs ($e$ALPs) which also involve $W$-$\ell$-$\nu$-$a$ four-point interaction and have obvious energy enhancement behaviors in their cross sections when the collision energy is increasing. On the other hand, heavier $e$ALPs mainly decay to a photon pair induced by the chiral anomaly instead of an electron-positron pair. Therefore, studies of these t-channel processes with a photon pair plus missing energy at $e^+ e^-$ and $ep$ colliders open a new door to search for $e$ALPs at high energy colliders. The proposed search strategies are not only aiming to generate a larger production rate of ALPs, but also trying to distinguish electroweak-violating ALP-lepton interactions from electroweak-preserving ones.