Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment.
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2017;
118:092501. [PMID:
28306315 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.118.092501]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/14/2016] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
Abstract
The OLYMPUS Collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, R_{2γ}, a direct measure of the contribution of hard two-photon exchange to the elastic cross section. In the OLYMPUS measurement, 2.01 GeV electron and positron beams were directed through a hydrogen gas target internal to the DORIS storage ring at DESY. A toroidal magnetic spectrometer instrumented with drift chambers and time-of-flight scintillators detected elastically scattered leptons in coincidence with recoiling protons over a scattering angle range of ≈20° to 80°. The relative luminosity between the two beam species was monitored using tracking telescopes of interleaved gas electron multiplier and multiwire proportional chamber detectors at 12°, as well as symmetric Møller or Bhabha calorimeters at 1.29°. A total integrated luminosity of 4.5 fb^{-1} was collected. In the extraction of R_{2γ}, radiative effects were taken into account using a Monte Carlo generator to simulate the convolutions of internal bremsstrahlung with experiment-specific conditions such as detector acceptance and reconstruction efficiency. The resulting values of R_{2γ}, presented here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization 0.456<ε<0.978, are smaller than some hadronic two-photon exchange calculations predict, but are in reasonable agreement with a subtracted dispersion model and a phenomenological fit to the form factor data.
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