Speaker
Description
The Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) experiment at DESY will look for axion-like particles (ALPs) with low masses ($m<10^{-4}$ eV). ALPS II is a purely laboratory-based experiment, where ALPs could be produced and detected employing the light-shining-through-wall (LSW) technique using infrared photons with a wavelength of 1064 nm. ALPS II utilizes the concept of resonant enhancement on the production and regeneration side to improve the sensitivity of traditional LSW-experiments. The experiment requires a detection system capable of observing infrared photons at extremely small rates of the order of $10^{-5}s^{-1}$. For this purpose a system based on a transition edge sensor (TES), i.e. a cryogenic calorimeter, which exploits the drastic dependence of a material’s electrical resistance on the temperature in its transition region, is being developed. The talk will present the current status of ALPS II with special focus on the TES detection system.
