The IPB colloquium will be held on Tuesday, 3 July 2018 at 12:00 in the “Zvonko Marić” lecture hall of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled

"Light-by-light scattering at the LHC and the search for axion-like particles"

will be given by Prof. Dr. Matthias Schott (Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany).

Abstract of the talk:

Light-by-light scattering is a quantum-mechanical process that is forbidden in the classical theory of electrodynamics, but was predicted already more than 70 years ago by Heisenberg and Euler. This reaction is accessible at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) thanks to the large electromagnetic field strengths generated by ultra-relativistic colliding lead ions. Using 480 μb^{^-1} of lead–lead collision data, recorded at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.02 TeV by the ATLAS detector, a first evidence for light-by-light scattering in collisions was found. In this talk, we will review the experimental setup and the corresponding data-analysis with a special focus on potential systematic and theoretical uncertainties. Moreover, we will give an outlook on possible searches for axion-like particles using this reaction, as well as in proton-proton collisions in general.