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, $\it R_{2 \gamma}$, 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 $\approx$ 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 Møller/Bhabha calorimeters at 1:29°. A total integrated luminosity of $4.5 fb^{-1}$ was collected. In the extraction of $\it R_{2\gamma}$, 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 $\it R_{2\gamma}$, presented here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization 0:456 < $\epsilon$< 0:978, are smaller than hadronic two-photon exchange calculations predict, but are consistent with phenomenological models