Chasing the axion-like particles using the proton tagging with the CMS experiment

Various theories beyond the SM predict axion-like particles (ALPs) to address the longstanding questions in particle physics: the strong CP problem and the nature of dark matter. In particular, ALPs can be produced via photon fusion and decay back to a pair of photons, and their production can be identified in proton-proton collisions by tagging the surviving protons using CMS subsystems. In the project, we explore the sensitivity to discover ALPs, within the mass range between 50 GeV to 5 TeV. We aim at including events with only one tagged proton into analysis; we look for different ways to distinguish signal protons from those coming from background, and estimate the efficiency of chosen selection methods; we determine how much our sensitivity will improve with better detector time resolution; and finally, we compare the results to existing and future experiments.