Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment

The OLYMPUS Collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, R 2 γ , 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 Moller or Bhabha calorimeters at 1.29°. A total integrated luminosity of 4.5     fb − 1 was collected. In the extraction of R 2 γ , 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 2 γ , presented here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization 0.456 < e < 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.