Constraining axion-gluon coupling in monohadron processes

Abstract

The axion-gluon coupling can be constrained directly through hard exclusive processes at the LHC. Specifically, we study the associated production of a long-lived axion with a $\rho^0$ meson in ultra-peripheral $AA$ collisions and in $pp$ collisions. With the axion escaped from the detector, the final state is characterized by a mono-hadron signature. The main background in our analysis originates from the $\rho^0+\pi^0$ process, where the photons from the $\pi^0$ decay are undetected due to limited detector performance. Our analysis yields an exclusion limit of the axion-gluon coupling that is comparable to the limit obtained from the mono-jet process at the LHC.