Photon Regeneration Plans

Abstract

Precision experiments exploiting low-energy photons may yield information on particle physics complementary to experiments at high-energy colliders, in particular on new very light and very weakly interacting particles, predicted in many extensions of the standard model. Such particles may be produced by laser photons send along a transverse magnetic field. The laser polarization experiment PVLAS may have seen the first indirect signal of such particles by observing an anomalously large rotation of the polarization plane of photons after the passage through a magnetic field. This can be interpreted as evidence for photon disappearance due to particle production. There are a number of experimental proposals to test independently the particle interpretation of PVLAS. Many of them are based on the search for photon reappearance or regeneration, i.e. for ``light shining through a wall''. At DESY, the Axion-Like Particle Search (ALPS) collaboration is currently setting up such an experiment.