Assessment of ALP scenarios for GRB 221009A

Abstract: About one month after the revolutionary discovery of the Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) GRB 221009A and intense theoretical efforts to explain its detection, time seems to us ripe to make an assessment of the axion-like particle (ALP) based scenarios, since it is a common belief that conventional physics would have prevented such a detection. We overcome the almost complete lack of information -- so far only astronomical telegrams have been released -- by relying as much as possible upon the analogy with the emission from the GRB 190114C detected by the MAGIC collaboration in 2019, since it was the highest energy GRB detected before and for a time lapse similar to that over which GRB 221009A has been observed.