Leptophilic ALPs in laboratory experiments

We study the collider phenomenology of leptophilic axion-like particles (ALPs), i.e. pseudoscalar particles that couple only to charged leptons. Loops of charged leptons induce effective interactions of the ALPs with photons, which depend on the momenta of the interacting particles and differ between pseudoscalar and derivative lepton couplings. We systematically discuss the form of the interaction with photons for general external momenta and identify the regimes when it can be safely approximated by an effective coupling constant. We use these results to derive novel constraints from LEP and calculate state-of-the-art limits from E137 and NA64 for four different scenarios, in which the ALPs couple either to a single lepton generation or universally to all, for both pseudoscalar and derivative lepton couplings. We collect complementary bounds from astrophysics, flavour, and other laboratory experiments to chart the allowed parameter space of leptophilic ALPs in the MeV-GeV mass range.