Speaker
Description
The Any Light Particle Search II, ALPS II, is a Light Shining through
a Wall experiment at DESY in Hamburg, hunting for axions and axion-like
particles in the sub-meV mass range with an axion-photon coupling gαγγ >
2 × 10−11 GeV−1, improving sensitivity by a factor of 103 compared to its
predecessors. A high-power laser is directed through a long array of supercon-
ducting dipole magnets and an optical cavity, where some photons may convert
into a beam of axion-like particles, exploiting the inverse-Sikivie effect. The ax-
ion beam will then pass through a light-tight barrier and enter another strong
magnetic field in a second cavity, mode-matched to the cavity before the wall,
where some of the axion particles can convert back into photons and be detected.
The ALPS II experiment has begun the initial data acquisition phase without
the cavity before the wall to optimize stray-light hunting. At this stage, the het-
erodyne detector (HET) scheme is implemented for the detection of regenerated
photons. To confirm the results obtained with the HET, independent measure-
ments might subsequently be conducted with the superconducting Transition
Edge Sensors (TES). In this talk, we will describe the status and experience of
the initial data taking with ALPS II.
