Exploring interference effects between two ALP effective operators at the LHC

We observe that most studies of axion-like particle (ALP) production channels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) focus on a single type of ALP operator for each process in the effective field theory framework. In this work, we propose an alternative approach that considers two or more types of relevant ALP effective operators together in some specific ALP production channels and study their interference effects. Using the $p p\rightarrow t j a$ process with $a\rightarrow\gamma\gamma$ as an example, we show that this approach allows us to constrain the ALP interactions with both the $W$ boson and the top quark, as well as their interference in a single process. For the final state with two isolated photons and a top quark decaying semi-leptonically, we predict that the future bounds on the ALP decay constant can reach around $f_a \sim 10\;(20) $ TeV for $25$ GeV $< M_a < 100$ GeV at the LHC with 300 (3000) fb$^{1}$ luminosity.