No light shining through a wall : new results from a photoregeneration experiment

Abstract

Recently, axion-like particle search has received renewed interest. In particular, several groups have started ``light shining through a wall'' experiments based on magnetic field and laser both continuous, which is very demanding in terms of detector background. We present here the 2$\sigma$ limits obtained so far with our novel set-up consisting of a pulsed magnetic field and a pulsed laser. In particular, we have found that the axion-like particle two photons inverse coupling constant $M$ is $> 8\times 10^5$ GeV provided that the particle mass $m_\mathrm{a} \sim$ 1 meV. Our results definitively invalidate the axion interpretation of the original PVLAS optical measurements with a confidence level greater than 99.9%.