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_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 GEM and MWPC detectors at 12 , as well as symmetric Moeller/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.