Direct detections of the Axion-like particle Revisited

Abstract

Axion-like particles (ALPs) are promising dark matter candidates. Their signals in direct detection experiments arise from the well-known inverse Primakoff effect or the inverse Compton scattering of the ALPs with the electron. In this paper, we revisit the direct detection of ALP by carefully considering the interference between the inverse Primakoff amplitude and the inverse Compton amplitude in the scattering process $a+e \to e+\gamma$ for the first time. It shows that the contribution of the interference term turns to be dominated in the scattering for a large ALP energy. Given the new analytical formula, signals or constraints of ALP couplings in various projected experiments are investigated. Our results show that these experiments may put strong constraints on ALP couplings for relatively heavy ALP. We further study projected constraints on the ALP from the JUNO experiment, which shows competitive constraints on ALP couplings using a ten-year exposure.