Collider constraints on massive gravitons coupling to photons

Abstract

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 electron-positron (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→γγ 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, γγ partial widths, and decay kinematics of the pseudoscalar and tensor particles, we reinterpret existing experimental bounds on the ALP-γ coupling into G-γ ones. Using the available data, exclusion limits on the graviton-photon coupling are set down to gGγ≈1–0.05 TeV−1 for masses mG≈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.