ALPS II technical overview and status report

Abstract

The Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) is an experiment that utilizes the concept of resonant enhancement to improve on the sensitivity of traditional light shining through a wall style experiments. These experiments attempt to detect photons passing through an opaque wall by converting to relativistic weakly interacting sub-eV particles and then reconverting back to photons. ALPS II at DESY in Hamburg, Germany will use dually resonant optical cavities before and after the wall to increase the probability of this interaction occurring. This paper gives a technical overview and status report of the experiment.