Search for photon oscillations into massive particles

Recently, axionlike particle search has received renewed interest, and several groups have started experiments. In this paper, we present the final results of our experiment on photon-axion oscillations in the presence of a magnetic field, which took place at the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation des Lasers Intenses, Palaiseau, France. Our null measurement allowed us to exclude the existence of axions with inverse coupling constant M > 9.x10(5) GeV for low axion masses and to improve the preceding Brookhaven-Fermilab-Rochester-Trieste (BFRT) Collaboration limits by a factor of 3 or more for axion masses 1.1 < m(a)< 2.6 meV. We also show that our experimental results improve the existing limits on the parameters of a low mass hidden-sector boson usually dubbed paraphoton because of its similarity with the usual photon. We detail our apparatus which is based on the light shining through the wall technique. We compare our results to other existing ones.