Pilot search for axion-like particles by a three-beam stimulated resonant photon collider with short pulse lasers

TL;DR

This paper proposes and demonstrates a novel three-beam laser collider concept to search for axion-like particles in vacuum, establishing a method to evaluate polarization bias and setting new upper limits on ALP-photon coupling.

Contribution

It introduces a new stimulated resonant photon collider concept using three short pulse lasers and provides a proof-of-principle experiment with polarization bias evaluation.

Findings

No axion-like particles detected in the pilot search.

Set upper limit on ALP-photon coupling at $1.5 imes 10^{-4}$ GeV${}^{-1}$ for 1.53 eV mass.

Developed a method to evaluate polarization bias in the system.

Abstract

Toward the systematic search for axion-like particles in the eV mass range, we proposed the concept of a stimulated resonant photon collider by focusing three short pulse lasers into vacuum. In order to realize such a collider, we have performed a proof-of-principle experiment with a set of large incident angles between three beams to overcome the expected difficulty to ensure the space-time overlap between short pulse lasers and also established a method to evaluate the bias on the polarization states, which is useful for a future variable-incident-angle collision system. In this paper we present a result from the pilot search with the developed system and the method. The search result was consistent with null. We thus have set the upper limit on the minimum ALP-photon coupling down to $1.5 \times 10^{-4}$ GeV${}^{-1}$ at the ALP mass of 1.53 eV with a confidence level of 95 %.