Collider constraints on massive gravitons coupling to photons

We study the discovery potential of massive graviton-like spin-2 particles coupled to standard model fields, produced in photon-photon collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as in electronpositron (e+e-) collisions, within an effective theory with and without universal couplings. Our focus is on a massive graviton G coupled to the electromagnetic field, which decays via G gamma gamma and leads to a resonant excess of diphotons over the light-by-light scattering continuum at the LHC, and of triphoton final states at e+e- colliders. Based on similar searches performed for pseudoscalar axion-like particles (ALPs), and taking into account the different cross sections, gamma gamma partial widths, and decay kinematics of the pseudoscalar and tensor particles, we reinterpret existing experimental bounds on the ALP-gamma coupling into G-gamma ones. Using the available data, exclusion limits on the graviton-photon coupling are set down to gG gamma N 1-0.05 TeV-1 for masses mG N 100 MeV-2 TeV. Such bounds can be improved by factors of 100 at Belle II in the low-mass region, and of 4 at the HL-LHC at high masses, with their expected full integrated luminosities.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/). Funded by SCOAP3.

Automated summary

This study investigates the discovery potential of massive spin-2 particles coupled to standard model fields in photon-photon collisions at the LHC and electron-positron collisions. The focus is on a massive graviton G coupled to the electromagnetic field, which leads to a resonant excess of diphotons at the LHC and triphoton final states at e+e- colliders through the decay process G gamma gamma. Existing experimental bounds on the ALP-gamma coupling are reinterpreted to determine exclusion limits on the G-gamma coupling.