Probing axion-like particles through associated gauge-boson recoil and polarization at the LHC
Abstract
Axion-like particles (ALPs) appear in many well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model (SM) and can exhibit characteristic interactions with electroweak gauge bosons (V = W±/ Z) through higher-dimensional operators. We explore the production of ALPs (a) in association with V at the HL-LHC, with √s=14 TeV and an integrated luminosity of ℒ=3 ab−1. We study the process pp→ Va, with a→γγ, for ALP masses in the range 20 GeV≤ ma≤ 200 GeV. This analysis extends existing associated-production searches by exploiting characteristic recoil and polarization features induced by the momentum-dependent V−V−a interaction. Using both cut-based selections and an XGBoost multivariate analysis, we demonstrate that these observables provide robust discrimination against SM backgrounds beyond the diphoton mass peak, improving the sensitivity to electroweak ALP couplings to CWW ≳ 5.6 × 10−3 TeV−1 and CBB ≳ 2.8× 10−2 TeV−1. We further show that, if a resonance peak is observed in data, the same observables can help distinguish an ALP-like signal from a Higgs-like spin--0 state of the same mass.
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BibTeX
@misc{de2026probing,
title = {{Probing axion-like particles through associated gauge-boson recoil and polarization at the LHC}},
author = {Amandip De and Monoranjan Guchait and Arnab Roy},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.07312},
eprint = {2610.07312},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07312},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Probing axion-like particles through associated gauge-boson recoil and polarization at the LHC
AU - Amandip De
AU - Monoranjan Guchait
AU - Arnab Roy
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.07312
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07312
AB - Axion-like particles (ALPs) appear in many well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model (SM) and can exhibit characteristic interactions with electroweak gauge bosons (V = W^±/ Z) through higher-dimensional operators. We explore the production of ALPs (a) in association with V at the HL-LHC, with √s=14 TeV and an integrated luminosity of ℒ=3 ab^−1. We study the process pp→ Va, with a→γγ, for ALP masses in the range 20 GeV≤ m_a≤ 200 GeV. This analysis extends existing associated-production searches by exploiting characteristic recoil and polarization features induced by the momentum-dependent V−V−a interaction. Using both cut-based selections and an XGBoost multivariate analysis, we demonstrate that these observables provide robust discrimination against SM backgrounds beyond the diphoton mass peak, improving the sensitivity to electroweak ALP couplings to C_WW ≳ 5.6 × 10^−3 TeV^−1 and C_BB ≳ 2.8× 10^−2 TeV^−1. We further show that, if a resonance peak is observed in data, the same observables can help distinguish an ALP-like signal from a Higgs-like spin--0 state of the same mass.
ER -